Just wanted to put up a short post today about the new website for Wikimedia Pennsylvania. The url is:
http://pa.us.wikimedia.org
It's a flurry of activity trying to get all the necessary pages set up, and getting user accounts created and all that fun stuff. I've never seen the creation of a new wiki before, and a fresh, un-edited wiki truely is a beautiful sight to behold. It's like raw potential to become something, anything, great.
We'll be posting more information as it comes up, both here on the blog and there on the website. Hopefully we are getting nearer to a point when we can submit our bylaws to the ChapCom and become an official chapter!!
This evening there was a wikimeetup in Philadelphia, and though there were few people in attendance (there were about 20 people or so, and I've never been to another wikimeetup so I have nothing to compare it to) I would say it was an excellent success. We introduced ourselves all around, took some good pictures, and made the crucial announcement about the new chapter.
The response was generally very positive, and even the few people who were more cautious about the idea seemed interested in the concept. It's very clear that our chapter is not "traditional" in the sense of the previous chapters. Since we are just a state, and we are generally english-speaking, we aren't going to serve as any sort of informal embassy or point of contact for the WMF.
What we can do, however...
Announcements
We made an official announcement on at the Philadelphia Wikimeetup.
We are going to be meeting with a lawyer eventually to talk about the bylaws and the process of incorporating.
We still need to work on the bylaws, anybody who is interested is welcome to take a look at them and make suggestions.
A new logo still needs to be proposed and put to use.
Current Events
This will be filled with real-life Pennsylvania news soon. Please stay tuned.
Communication
For IRC discussion, we have a channel up and running on freenode: #wikimedia-pa
