Wikipedia talk:Meetup/Seattle1

Preliminary discussion cobbled together, primarily from User talk:Jwrosenzweig and User talk:Michael Snow.

Seattle meetup
You once mentioned the idea of doing a Seattle-area meetup, and inspired by the pending Chicago meetup, I was wondering if it would be a good time to try and organize something. I don't know how big of a crowd we might get - hopefully people might consider traveling from the Vancouver or Portland areas, although the event probably wouldn't have the same draw as Jimbo's star power. But even if it was nothing more than the two of us, I think it would be rewarding nevertheless. --Michael Snow 22:25, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * Actually, the thought had reoccurred to me just recently -- glad you thought of it too. I'm teaching now, so my schedule has gotten more complicated than it once was -- Friday and Saturday nights are therefore best (well, all day Saturday, actually), although nights preceding school holidays like Veteran's Day (or nights on a school holiday like Veteran's Day) work well also.  Would you give your schedule a look and propose a list of dates?  Once we have one, I think it could be publicized in the usual places -- I know Jmabel and Lukobe are local, and I think a few other contributors are (at least one is a UW student who's been polishing up those pages).  We may have lost all our Vancouver editors, I can't remember, but certainly it would be good to meet some of them.  You're right that the lack of star power will reduce turnout, but then I'd frankly rather spend time getting to know a few people than spend time trying to simply shake all the hands of a massive crowd. :-)  Maybe we should start setting up the details in a user subpage -- yours or mine?  Makes no difference to me either way.  Thanks for the spark -- let's make this happen.  Jwrosenzweig 14:00, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Saturdays sound best to me; I think basically all meetups so far have been scheduled for weekends. At least a few weeks lead time is probably called for, so October 16 is the earliest date I would even consider possible. At the other end of the window, I think getting it done before Thanksgiving weekend would be best, which leaves November 20 as the latest possible date. In between those, October 30 is a probable conflict for me and likely not an ideal choice due to competition from Halloween-related events.

The other major competition that I can think of, given Wikipedia's skew towards a college-age male demographic, is college football. The Husky football schedule for the relevant weeks is: Of course, I don't know if any of our potential attendees go to the games or care about them (less likely given the current state of the team), but if nothing else it might be a consideration for traffic and/or parking, depending on the time and venue we choose.
 * October 16 Oregon State, 12:30 PM
 * October 23 at USC, 1:30 PM
 * October 30 at Oregon, 12:30 PM
 * November 6 Arizona, 12:30 PM
 * November 13 California, 12:30 PM
 * November 20 at Washington State, 5:00 PM

Speaking of venues, do you have any ideas or preferences? Presumably indoors at least, in light of the season. Various possibilities would include restaurants, library or school/university spaces, other community facilities, or private homes. --Michael Snow 16:26, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * Let's look at those first two Saturdays in November -- does either one appeal to you? I can do either one at this point.  I think 16th is too soon, the 23rd is the Huskies at the #1 team in the nation, which will probably distract at least a few, and the 30th was out for you and for Halloween.  Let me know which Saturday you prefer.  If you have absolutely no preference, let's aim for the 6th.  As far as a location goes, the brand new downtown Seattle library presents itself as a good candidate -- perhaps in the cafe on the main level?  I'd be open to other possibilities also -- on the UW campus (a library, cafe, or the student union bldg.), Bell Square, a restaurant that doesn't mind a lively discussion happening in the corner.  I'm in Sammamish -- I don't know where you'll be coming from.  If you have some preferences, feel free to suggest them: I'm just tossing around some ideas that occur to me at the present.  Let me know what you think. Jwrosenzweig 20:06, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Date: I agree, let's shoot for November 6th, and then we can use November 13th as a fall-back option in case people have lots of scheduling conflicts or if venue availability is problematic. No need to try and take on the Apple Cup (I'm glad to discover the article already exists).

Place: The downtown library would be the perfect choice, in my opinion. Appropriate to our mission, a worthwhile destination as a building, an easy landmark for people traveling in or unfamiliar with downtown. Although I haven't been inside yet (for my sins), I will try and find some time this Saturday to scout the location, just to be sure there will be enough space for the kind of group we anticipate. From checking out the library website, the cafe area is small (seats 20), which may be enough anyway but I'm not sure what the competition from other patrons will be like - and since it is a library, minimizing disruption to other patrons seems like a sensible courtesy. There are some study/project rooms we could also use if one is open. The website says the larger meeting rooms aren't available until 2005, and start taking reservations in October (are the rooms not finished yet?). The smallest holds 29, which is probably larger than we need anyway, but something to consider if we want to have future, larger Wikipedia events in Seattle.

Time: If it is the library, hours are 10-6 on Saturdays. I would suggest 2 or 3 o'clock. Late enough that people can sleep in and/or get other things done, miss Husky pregame traffic, etc. Still would give us plenty of time before the library closes, depending on how long people want to stay, and then if anyone wants even more, they can move on to another location for dinner and so on into the evening. --Michael Snow 21:48, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * The 6th it is. I haven't been inside the library either (and we call ourselves scholars!), but I read the special section in the newspaper so many times, poring (pouring?) over diagrams that I feel as if I know the space.  Though obviously I don't, since I thought the cafe space was bigger.  Any scouting you can do would be fantastic -- Seattle's a bit of a drive for me, and I don't do it often.  As far as meeting space, a study room of some kind would be wonderful -- can we arrange it as private citizens, so to speak?  I like the 3 pm idea -- lends itself naturally to dinner downtown somewhere if anyone is willing, without imposing the expense on starving college students (or starving public school teachers, come to think of it, but I think I can swing it if people are interested).  Two things remain, then -- what page shall we use to plan this (a user subpage or something in the Wikipedia namespace?) and when/how shall we announce it (village pump?  mailing list?  both?)? Jwrosenzweig 21:55, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I've left messages on Jmabel's and Lukobe's talk pages about this, so if they want to come but can't make the 6th then we can change the date. As far as a page to organize it, we can probably use Meetup or create a subpage thereof. I'll wait until after my scouting trip before making a general announcement, which will give them time to respond as well. Based on my experience, I would try to advertise in as many places as possible, because there really isn't any one place where people look for things. --Michael Snow 22:14, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * Sounds very good. I left notes (having see you do so) for User:Jkiang, the fellow who rewrote the UW page and is a student there, I think, as well as User:JHK, who is unlikely to attend (she was one of the early Wikipedipioneers who is on semi-permanent vacation now, but now and then I catch her lurking and she always seems pleasant -- I thought it would be neat to get a sense of the history of the site if she showed).  I also dropped notes to Mkmcconn and Llywrch as the only two Portlanders I can think of.  The only fellow in Vancouver anymore (now that Vancouverguy is gone) is Eclecticology, I think -- I'll drop him a note.  I figure the odds of any of them attending is low, but it would be neat to meet them if they wanted to make the trip.  I figure if one or two out-of-towners show and most of us in-towners do also, that's 6-7 people, which is a good number, I think -- small enough to be manageable but large enough to have a couple of conversations going at once.  The only other experienced name I know in the general area is Sarge Baldy, but he's down in Corvallis and I figure that's too far to drive for a Saturday afternoon meeting.  If he doesn't think so, I'm sure he'll catch the announcement on the pump. Jwrosenzweig 22:23, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Sure, I'm for this. Let me know when you have a precise time. By the way, there is also great space on the 10th floor of the library, east side; other than the lack of refreshments, it may be a better meeting spot than the cafe. Can you set up a page for planning this, so we can all watchlist it? -- Jmabel 22:22, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I'll be sure to check out the 10th floor too and see if it's suitable. I just don't want to be stuck in a part of the library where we need to be overly concerned about noise. And we'll definitely create a dedicated page soon so people can watchlist it. --Michael Snow 22:27, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * Sorry I couldn't make it--the holidays are coming and as an employee of a major internet retailer :) I had to work. --Lukobe 07:41, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

Proactive publicity
I'm presuming that whoever started this has contacted a number of people, but what exactly besides creating this page is being done to let people know this is happening? -- Jmabel 23:37, Oct 2, 2004 (UTC)


 * I was planning to announce it on the Village pump, Goings-on, and the WikiEN mailing list. Hopefully that will reach most people who would be interested that we don't know about. --Michael Snow 03:16, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Also I'd suggest Wikipedians/Washington and maybe even Wikipedians/Oregon and Wikipedians/Canada#British_Columbia, which I bet is mostly near Vancouver. I for one would be perfectly glad to host an out-of-towner or two if they want to come for this... -- Jmabel 05:48, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

Where exactly to meet
Alright, having made an actual physical visit to the library, I think meeting at the tables by the coffee cart, as Jwrosenzweig suggested, is probably fine. It's an easily identifiable location, near the entrance (the Fifth Avenue entrance, that is, which is the 3rd floor of the library), and allows people to sit down. I don't know that we want to stay there the whole time, but once people have gathered there are other spots we can move to where we won't feel the need to act like church mice. And while the library is reasonably well-populated, I think the competition for space won't be much of a problem. Any objections to this plan? --Michael Snow 04:09, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Michael, I didn't have objections before, but at this point it's obvious you and I grossly underestimated the number of Wikipedians in the area. :-) With 13 (not including Bryce's friends), we're going to overwhelm the cafe.  That may be a good place to meet for those who don't know the library (easy to find), but I'm sure that this many is too many to stay there without inconveniencing the library -- what about the locations you scouted.  Any rooms that you anticipate we'll head for?  That way we can tell people "meet us before 3 at the cafe if you don't want to get lost looking for conference room Q1313, which is where we'll go at 3".  Just a suggestion -- I'm open to any others.  Jwrosenzweig 22:26, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Again, there is a very pleasant space on the east side of the 10th floor. I'd much rather be there than in one of the might-as-well-be-anywhere conference rooms. -- Jmabel|Talk 23:10, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)
 * Sounds great to me, but would we be at all disturbing to patrons? I'd rather not get tossed out on my ear. :-)  But I haven't been inside yet (only studied floor plans in the paper), so I don't know where that is.  If it's a good place for this size of a group where we could talk at a reasonable level without troubling anyone, I'm all for it. Jwrosenzweig 23:17, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * On the 10th floor I was a little worried about whether a large conversational group might be disruptive. On the 3rd floor itself, though not right by the coffee cart, there is what you might call "common space" where whispering is not particularly required. Wherever we end up going, I'd be willing to wait behind by myself for a little while and bring any stragglers to join the main group.


 * Overall, I'm thrilled to have the turnout be even more than we expected. I wasn't thinking of the cafe tables as anything more than a handy landmark, and didn't really anticipate we'd necessarily stay there the whole time, regardless of the group's size. --Michael Snow 23:52, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Agenda
I don't want to make this too official or anything, but I think it would be a good idea to list here anything we think we might want to discuss as a group. I can't imagine what that would be, other than to discuss whether or not it would be fun to have a "regional board". The Deep South and New England now both have regional posting boards where they work on local topics of interest. Do we want a PNW board? I don't know, but I'm willing to talk it over -- obviously we have a lot of Wikipedians in the area with free time on Saturdays. ;-) Maybe we have time to pursue something like that.  Any other ideas?

Also, quizzes were given at the London and Boston wikimeets. Is this more of a casual gathering, or would something like that be fun? If so, does someone want to put it together? The content of the quizzes (which were good and difficult) can be found by link-surfing from Meetup to the info pages about London and Boston -- I don't have the links in my memory. Just thought I'd mention it. Any and all reactions, counterproposals, and ideas are welcome. Jwrosenzweig 22:52, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

There are a few things I'd like to see on an agenda:
 * What we can do to support Wikipedia outreach to under-represented communities (e.g. Native American, African-American)
 * What we can do by way of outreach to librarians to help them better understand Wikipedia and its strengths and weaknesses as a reference (especially how to use it well).
 * Possibility of establishing a roughly monthly casual get-together.

I'd love to see us locally take on some prototype outreach projects that might potentially be replicated elsewhere. -- Jmabel|Talk 23:10, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)
 * I'm game for discussion -- it sounds good. Are you willing to come with some more specific ideas in mind?  That would help me -- outreach is a big term and I'm having trouble envisioning what you're thinking of.  And every other month might be a better idea (it's a ways to travel for our Oregon friends, and I don't know if we'd have enough to chat about going monthly) from my perspective, though of course we'll need to talk over the timing of it as a group. :-)  Great ideas: I'm glad to see we'll be doing more than say "oh, is that what you look like in real life?"! Jwrosenzweig 23:21, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * Yes, I've been thinking about the outreach issues a lot, I'll be coming with several ideas. -- Jmabel|Talk 05:34, Oct 14, 2004 (UTC)

I've given a little bit of thought to a quiz and have some potential questions in mind, so I can probably work that up. If people are interested we can do it, if not it can be done another time. As for the agenda, I figure once we've gone through the initial introductions and casual conversation, a group discussion on the issues Jmabel mentions could be held. Anyone who has additional items they want raised is welcome to suggest them too, I think. One thing I'd be particularly interested in is hearing something from Bryce about the very earliest days of Wikipedia - he's one of the people who came over from GNUPedia right after it started. --Michael Snow 23:59, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Last minute checkin
Just want to be sure we're all still on board. Michael, are you doing the quiz? Need any help, or is it under control? I assume you're way ahead of me there. Also, we haven't talked about recognizing each other -- should we all assume some characteristic posture or chant "wiki wiki wiki" as we walk around the library cafe? ;-) Seriously, though, I don't want us to look like an outing of the Red Hat Society but have we given any thought to how we will meet otherwise?  I'm not normally one to ask strangers if they edit an open source encyclopedia, but if that's the only reasonable way of doing this, I'll live I'm sure. :-)  Just curious if anyone had given this some thought... Jwrosenzweig 21:13, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * The quiz is not finished yet, but I think I have it under control. I didn't want to encourage suggestions for fear of giving anyone an unfair advantage. To aid in recognition, I was thinking of printing out a copy of the picture I cobbled together to illustrate the page - just put that out and people should be able to figure out which one is the table full of Wikipedians, assuming that eavesdropping on conversations won't already be sufficient. --Michael Snow 22:36, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * As always, Michael, your proposal is wise. I'll look for the Wiki-ed Space Needle -- thanks! Jwrosenzweig 22:54, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Pictures
Could someone put names under the pictures so that we can share seeing people ? SweetLittleFluffyThing 15:19, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * I have done so, although in a couple of cases it was hard to decide whether or not to name a person who was obscured save for a right foot. :-) Hopefully no one minds, and if they do, they can pull out their name. Jwrosenzweig 19:07, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks :-) It is always so funny and interesting; I did not see Ec as hairy, nor Michael so young :-) Overall, the average age is significantly older than the meetings I participated to till now :-) - ant

Quiz
Jeeee, I made it in the quiz !!! SweetLittleFluffyThing 19:36, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * I think you were the most readily identified user in the "real name/username/sig" mix and match. :-) Jwrosenzweig 19:37, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Librarian Symposium Presentation Idea
One of the topics that was discussed quite heavily was "How to make Librarians more accepting of Wikipedia". One suggestion I had was to find out if there are any conventions/symposia/etc. that librarians (or other educators) go to, and encourage someone to give a talk there.

This is an extremely common and effective technique used by other areas of the open source community to get the word out about what they're doing, and to plan out future direction face-to-face.

In some projects I've been in, we've collaborated on helping the speaker put together his slides; I think this model would work quite well for Wikipedia.

Some symposiums charge an entry fee to attend; I think most give free access for speakers, but if not, and if it seems like a key one for Wikipedia to present at, a collection could be considered.

Some topics that may be worth raising in a presentation to a group of librarians could go something like:
 * What is Open Source Philosophy and why is it so important to today's world?
 * What is Wikipedia?
 * How does Wikipedia work?
 * Walk-thru example of creating/editing/categorizing an article
 * How Wikipedia has become a key information resource for the entire world.
 * Wikipedia has weaknesses - we need your skills and ideas to help make Wikipedia a better reference
 * The future of Wikipedia

-- BryceHarrington
 * I like your ideas, Bryce -- I hope you'd be willing to be one of these speakers? :-) I think you can talk very knowledgably about open source projects, and about Wikipedia's relative strengths and weaknesses sompared with other open source projects.  I'm also interested in Joe Mabel's ideas about an open conversation with librarians (through the Gates Foundation, as I recall) which might go along similar lines.  Hopefully we can kick some of those ideas around here, perhaps get more input from people outside our region. Jwrosenzweig 20:21, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * I was thinking that the best reception would be gained from speakers who hold academic credentials or teaching positions, since their backgrounds would probably resonate better with librarians, but I'd certainly be willing to give a talk if not. :-)  Bryce 21:33, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Credentials are always nice, but having good ideas and presenting them well will trump credentialed incompetence almost every time.


 * Dan Keshet started an article relevant to this at Researching with Wikipedia. I've contributed a little. I'd love to see people jump into this. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:49, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)


 * If you guys can identify a worthwhile conference in the greater Portland area to talk about Wikipedia, and can help put together a Wikipedia presentation, I'd be quite willing to have a shot at giving it there. But I have to add I'm far from a skilled speaker...  Bryce 06:19, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'd gladly talk on something like this, and believe I am a pretty good presenter (although the ideal would be someone with a library sciences degree, for obvious reasons). My hope, though, for a first shot would be less a conference presentation than a sit-down with 3 or so Wikipedians and 3-to-5 librarians, more of a give and take. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:29, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)


 * I'd gladly volunteer to talk as well. I have quite a few years academic research and teaching experience (in my former life). --- Decumanus 21:31, 2004 Nov 8 (UTC)

Wikipedia 1.0
Another topic that was raised and discussed was what a "1.0 release" would mean. We talked about review processes (such as assembling something like Review Boards, perhaps on a per-page or per-area basis). I made the point that for most open source projects there is a strong danger in trying to focus on a 1.0 release as being the paragon of perfection; this often will lead to 'analysis paralysis' where the team gets stuck trying to make everything 100% perfect before showing anything off. A much better approach is the 'release early, release often': You take your code and go through the release process, worrying less about making it perfect than with making it useful and usable. Then collect feedback from your users (in the form of bug reports, requests, etc.) and immediately start work on the next version.

One idea could be that, since there are so many articles in wikipedia, that instead of starting with EVERYTHING and polishing each article, to instead start from NOTHING and create a 0.01 release with only a handful of the best articles. For instance, the featured article section could be an excellent place to start, especially since these articles have probably received the most thorough and complete review of any in the system, and are probably pretty "complete".

We also mentioned the importance of having the reviewed "release" version of the page be tagged with the names of the review board, to give some authority and accountability to the page, and to distinguish it from future edited versions. This notion of 'tagging' is common in software revision control systems; if there is not a tagging capability in MediaWiki currently, I'm sure it would be a reasonable thing to have added.

-- BryceHarrington

User Communities and Civility
Another topic that received a lot of discussion was ensuring civility between participants, and problems with too much rudeness. It was felt, for example, that this posed a barrier to entry for newbies, discouraged diversity, and led to burnout among old timers (especially admins).

I've seen these issues in many open source projects before, and remarked that this seemed to be an issue about human nature moreso than any problem with Wikipedia itself. When communities grow beyond certain sizes, they change social dynamics. For example, 6-8 people is the limit for having a unified discussion; above this the group typically will break into multiple conversations. A really good manager can handle about 8 people reporting directly to him.

30 is another magic number; this is an effective limit for close bond relationships; you see this number voiced in relation to team sizes, classroom sizes, departments, etc. In groups between 8-30 people, there is a strong social pressure to be civil to one another and to try to get along. Most likely you're going to be seeing that person every day, so having a bad relationship with that person can result in problems with your relationship to the group itself; you seek to find "working relationships" with the individual - you may not like them or agree with them, but a level of politeness and cooperation exists for the sake of cohesiveness.

30-300 appears to be the optimal size for "tribal identity". Below 30, and the group is really just a band, not large enough to have a distinct, permanent identity separate from its members. Above 300, the opportunities for running across someone you already have built a relationship are too low. The value of establishing relationships with group-members has fallen below a critical point, so the incentive to be civil does not work as well - it's ok to be curt or rude with people because you may not run into them again, or at least you won't have to work closely with them in order to exist in the group. A teacher once remarked that 300 has also been identified as the optimal size for a school. As the group grows higher beyond 300, the social dynamic returns to the beginning; people look at establishing tribes-within-the-tribe, which can lead to all sorts of interesting disfunctions. ;-)

A good place to learn more about these community size limits is some of the research papers written about MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) communities. They had found a rather ironic pattern - that the more successful the MUD, the more people came, and the more quickly it failed. They noticed that the "best" MUDs with the most long-lived and enjoyable communities that were limited in size to below about 300. The US Army has also done a great deal of research into group size and dynamics.

At the meetup, Joe presented the idea of establishing "safe areas" - groups given a specific objective to work on semi-independently of the wikipedia-at-large community. I think that this would be quite in keeping with the above group size theory. To some extent this probably already happens naturally, judging from the number of side projects spun-off from Wikipedia itself. But perhaps good results could be attained if Wikipedia undertook this more deliberately. For example, the Wikipedia project could establish a sectioned off working environment for students working on class projects; this environment would have room for, say, 5 classes of 20-30 students each to build their projects and assist one another in developing articles that would be delivered to Wikipedia itself at the conclusion of the class.

Over the years I've also noticed a natural grouping of Wikipedians into topic groups; when I started everyone generally pitched in everywhere on any topic. It was normal to keep an eye on the RecentChanges page for work your friends were doing and pop into any random topic to help fix spellings, toss in ideas, critique, etc. These days, though, RecentChanges moves way too quickly to stay atop of all the changes, and most of the names that show up are not people you "know". However, I have noticed that focus groups have emerged - e.g., a group of people who work together on a certain topic area, etc. Unfortunately, these are rather ad hoc groupings and appear to be of the tribe-within-a-tribe variety. An idea would be to give some mechanisms that enable these groups to attain stronger "self-identity", allowing them to strengthen their relationships with each other and to establish their own internal group rules and dynamics. There are risks to doing this, however; it is common for this kind of grouping to engender a counterproductive us-vs-them dynamic - this could reveal itself in massive "edit wars" between two groups. A way to avoid this may be to enable the group to strongly isolate itself from the larger community, and interact through a controlled "social protocol" of some sort. For example, let them work independently from Wikipedia on pages that are currently 'locked' for one reason or other and when they feel they have completed a suitable replacement, to deliver it to a review board to replace the locked page.

If this model worked, we could see Wikipedia evolve from being a wide open free-for-all into being more of an integration point, where the interesting and intensive work more often occurs in these focus groups. Other large open source projects have benefitted from this social model; the Linux kernel and Apache communities, to name two examples, are composed of a central codebase plus a large number of satellite module or driver development communities.

-- BryceHarrington

Managing this page
Should we maybe move the current contents of this to something like Meetup/Seattle November 6, 2004 (with a link from Meetup/Seattle) to allow us to start using Meetup/Seattle to plan the next one for early 2005? -- Jmabel | Talk 09:02, Nov 12, 2004 (UTC)
 * Sounds excellent to me -- One suggestion I'd make, though, is to put it at Meetup/Seattle/November 6, 2004 (assuming double subpages aren't doubleplusungood) -- that way every Meetup's archive will autolink back to Meetup/Seattle at the top of the page. Just a thought. Jwrosenzweig 16:14, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * Sounds smarter, I'll go for it. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:32, Nov 12, 2004 (UTC)