Ideas for communities

Some interesting discussions about how to develop local / US wikipedia communities over the course of the year have included:

• using on-wiki alternatives to Meetup.com, improving the Meetup pages on en.wp and meta, and their synchronization
• organizing local outings, parties, knowledge gathering and wiki capture (of photos, from library jams, through distributed research projects)
• working with Universities: getting WP clubs set up, petitioning schools to become more wiki aware: starting school-wide wikis, using wikis in classes. Having a core of students who can talk about WP and how it works

to classes on technology, collaborative writing, group creation, cyberlaw, and more.

• working with local non-profits and tech groups that want to get to know wikis in general, mediawiki in particular, and Wikipedia as a community and a place to contribute knowledge about the topics they encounter or

care about.

• organizing speakers and presentations at local libraries, high school and middle schools.

• organizing groups of language enthusiasts to contribute to and maintain a multilingual portal representing smaller languages present within the US, and identify language presence -- primary and secondary language

usage, oral and written.

• Talking to education and cultural preservation groups that might have content drives or curatorial projects; helping them understand how to integrate these with Wikipedia, and licensing in general

These are mostly general enough that we could start making a global "local initiatives" set of ideas on meta, for all chapters and enthusiast groups, formal and informal... but we should also work out how to do these things specifically within the US.

Questions

 - where are upcoming conferences that might love wp and appreciate a presence?
 - where are local university departments already investigating and researching 
and prominently using WP and sister projects?
 - where are local groups of mediawiki hackers and users, who might be
interested in wikipedia meetings as well?
 - who currently talks about wikipedia in their meanderings?  
literature search + introductory email ===> sponsors for local clubs and orgs
 - where are there spaces dedicated to free knowledge, free-content writing or 
media creation, and the like?  [For instance, start with the community television 
orgs (which until recently had lots of national funding to provide everyone  
access to tools to create media).  How can their current efforts integrate better 
with WP / do they have space to host meetings / do they already have regular 
meetings that could be extended somehow?]

There are likely other initiatives which have important local components; a t-shirt or poster design project, for instance.