Location Wiki - to help organise meet-ups

If anyone is interested in organising meet-ups, I've created a LOCATION WIKI. Add your name and location, and then whenever anyone wants to organise a meet-up in a particular area, the details of other people who are interested in meeting should all be in one place.

Please register here, too!

And please don't forget to come back here and post again if you move, and change your location on the wiki, too.

Hopefully it makes sense, and is self-explanatory; if not, please let me know.

Nina

Paul lately of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
erstwhile of Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England

Morphy of Minnesota, USA

***

I don't think most people have a wiki. Better off pointing to our profile. How do we do that?

I've added myself; as the first UK person to do so, had a bit of a debate about how to enter the name of the country - under UK or England (there isn't a heading level to cope with constituent countries within a united kingdom)!

I decided to go for a combined option:

The United Kingdom: England

This means that UK residents in other constituent parts could use:

The United Kingdom: Northern Ireland
The United Kingdom: Scotland (for as long as they choose to remain within the union, at least!)
The United Kingdom: Wales

This seems to make most sense, as it groups all UK residents together, but allows us to distinguish the different countries. Hope that makes sense to other UK people?

#3 I see what you mean, Morphy - I didn't realise the username link takes you through to the person's wiki page. The profile would certainly make more sense.

For profile links you need (http://www.librarything.com/profile/username username) using the square brackets.

Added myself though the chances of me being able to attend a meetup is slim:)

calm near Aberystwyth in Wales (UK)

Thanks Morphy and Genny.

I thought the link was to the profile page, but - as Morphy points out - it's not. So : copy the address of your profile page, and on the wiki, put it within square brackets, together with text which shows your user name, and any other name that folks on LT know you by.

Thanks for sorting out the UK, Genny. I had been thinking of doing something similar, but I thought I'd wait and see if people used the wiki, first. :)

ETA : (cross-posted) Or do it the way calm says.

ETA : changed the wiki, accordingly. Genny, Morphy and Britt - I don't know if you want to change your link, too.

I'm in Vienna, Austria. Hope I managed to do that right in the wiki.

I was going to change the order of the countries in Europe to alphabetical but then again, most people from UK so... views on that??

Wish I knew what I was doing! My listing looks different from the others but I clicked on the link and it took me to my profile page so I guess it's alright -- ????

9: Hey, if it works, it works, right? ;)

I also added myself... And I'm not even the only Dutch person on the list!

ETA: and I changed my link to link to my profile as well, guess that's better...

Added myself...and pushed NZ in ahead of Australia
:)

#8 I've now changed it - it is meant to be alphabetical, and it was when I first entered my bit under 'England' instead of UK, but then I altered it and forgot to move it below The Netherlands.

>11 LovingLit:: Oi!

>8 C4RO:: C4RO - I don't see you on the wiki. I'll add you in; please check it.

ETA : I've put the link in, to your home page. If you want to add any other names, please add it in after the square brackets.

>11 LovingLit:: As NZ comes after Australia alphabetically, I'm moving you back down :-)
>9 RebaRelishesReading:: Edited your link, Reba :)

I've added myself, thus giving California the honor of being the first U.S. state with TWO people! :-D

>15 staffordcastle:: Woo hoo!

I suspect that the States have the greatest proportion of LTers. If the wiki proves popular enough, we may have to eventually give you folks your own page.

Thanks for the edit -- I'll have to see if I can figure out what I did wrong. This is the first time I've even come near a Wiki

As many people would come to a meetup who don't want to be in a list like this, the best way of organizing one is still going to be to put a general message out in this group.

Sure, but it might help.

>17 RebaRelishesReading:: When you create the link to your profile page, it includes your username, but you still have to add a space and then your username within the square brackets after the web address. I think you put yours after closing the square brackets.

I'm in.
Editing the wiki always seems scary, but is actually quite straightforward when you get around to trying it!

(copy what the person above has done, and then edit the pertinant bits)

>20 humouress: you're right, I did. Thanks for fixing it.

I'll be honest, I'm not sure this will be a frequently used resource. Some people just won't want to list their "home" so openly out on the interwebs.

Hi, I have put myself down for London, UK and Voerde, Germany as I leave to equal parts of the year in either country. I hope I have done everything properly. :)

Great idea Nina.

You're welcome, Chautauquan.
Thanks, Bianca.

>18 MarthaJeanne:, 23: Both good points. I generally don't look at the meet-up board, but I'd be happy to meet people if they were organising one - hence the wiki, so they can get in touch with others in the same area. Probably the best way to cover all bases is to put a message on the board as well as contact people directly.

As for listing 'home', I do understand that, too. You can be vague, and just list under country, I suppose.

I've listed myself as "Washington DC", though I live in Virginia, because most of the LTers that I meet up with on a regular basis live in Maryland, but we meet up in DC.

Great idea! I've listed myself for Switzerland - Zürich.

The other matter is how far you're willing to go for a meetup. I've made myself a bit more vague than I'm willing to go - I'm in California, but an LA meetup is really not happening. But if I were in (Northern) Virginia, DC would be perfectly reasonable and Maryland quite possible, depending on where...even West Virginia is a solid maybe (I used to live in Arlington). Can't really capture that in the wiki.

Anyway, my point was - you can enter yourself quite vaguely, depending on your tolerance for being contacted for meetups a long way away.

>14 humouress: Thank you! I must have missed apply changes or something even simpler when I tried to add myself...

>28 jjmcgaffey:: True; but if someone messages you for a meet-up, based on your location as on the wiki, you can always 'yea' or 'nay'.

>29 C4RO:: You're welcome.

Ok I added my name and state---New York but its a pretty big state. NYC is eight hours away (by car) from where I live outside of Buffalo. It would be closer for me to meet up with people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Ontario, Canada. But at least it will give us some idea if there is another member somewhere in the vicinity so thank you for putting this together Nina.

I live in Atlanta, but I travel frequently to Philadelphia (where my parents live), NYC, San Francisco and London. I've added my name and state to the Wiki, although I probably wouldn't be interested in Georgia meet ups outside of the Atlanta metropolitan area, or possibly Savannah.

>31 brenzi:: You're welcome, brenzi.

And welcome to the wiki, everyone. I hope it proves useful!

The wiki has already proved useful! We're having a meetup this afternoon, and used the wiki to find a couple of people who we may not otherwise have realized were in the area.

I know I'm not the only LTer in Iowa, so here's hoping I get some company in the location wiki soon!

>34 _Zoe_:: That's absolutely wonderful, Zoe! I'm glad it's working. Hope the meet-up goes / went well. Let us know.

>35 rosalita:: Welcome, Rosalita.

Figured why not! and added myself. :) Yay for being the first Belgian (but really American) listed? haha.

>37 .Monkey.:: Yay! And welcome.

:)

I think I did it right, for California.

Yes, you did. That looks fine.

Thanks for joining us.

My LT profile mentions my actual location and I suppose many others do as well. However, when one is considering a big state like California, having just the state could mean that you are hundreds of miles from a fellow listed LT member. I wonder if some more granularity is in order or if the LT profile location is the way to handle this.

James

You could make it more granular if you wanted. I deliberately left it a little vague - actually vaguer than my profile.

Just jumped onboard as the second (or 2nd & 3rd) Swede(s).

Welcome aboard!

Nice to see so many people on the wiki. As I suspected, the U.S. of A. are running away with it.

Sorry, but wiki scares me. I may go back and try later.
My profile page:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/rainpebble

also known by belva at times

I live in Western Washington State in the U.S.A. in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. I am located 2 hours South of Seattle, Washington and 2 hours North of Portland, Oregon.

The hubby and I are going to attempt to make the Philly meet up in May of this year. We are both retired and thought we would take a road trip if we can save enough money. But for the most part I would only be doing those closer to home. It just happens that this year I am going to London, Ohio, U.S.A. to meet and visit friends in the Spring and hubby thought we could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

This is a great idea btw.

Okay, added myself to New York.

Added myself to Pennsylvania, but I have family in Virginia, so I'm there a fair amount, and I also spend much of the summer in New Hampshire...so, well, yeah; I'll just keep an eye and ear out :)

>40 MrsLee:: Well, some people who spend a lot of time in different places add their names to more than one location. You could do it that way, if you want.

Fayettville NC 28310

http://www.librarything.com/profile/xymon81

bump :0)

Bump.

As a resident of New York State -- which is, geographically speaking, big -- I'd like people's thoughts about whether (and how) that part of the wiki list should be subdivided. Counties could theoretically work, except for the five of them that make up NYC.

>53 AnnaClaire: At the moment there's only a handful of people listed for any one area, even California, so I think we probably wouldn't need it until the list gets longer. I don't know if counties or closest major metropolitan areas are better seeing as I have a skewed NYC notion of distance. I'll go to Manhattan or other parts of Brooklyn that I can get to on the F or the R, but that's about it.

(I went to Boston for Readercon earlier this month and it took me 4 hours to get back, by train, from Boston to Penn Station, and then 2 ridiculous hours and three trains playing alphabet soup on the lines to get home to Brooklyn from Penn Station. I swear, I could have walked across the river and back it took so long.)

It is probably not helped that this group has just 164 members with at least a passing interest in meeting other LT members in person. If all of those 164 were in the U.S. and evenly distributed among the 50 states, that would be just 3.28 per state.

James

Yeah, I see no reason to subdivide the wiki further right now. People can already include their more precise location next to their name if they want.

One other problem with these subdivisions is that many of us don't necessarily meet in their listed locations. I've had dozens of individual and group meet ups with LTers since 2009, in the United States and four European countries (and soon to be five, as I'll be in Paris from 23-25 September and will meet an LTer on the 24th or 25th), but only one of them has been in my home city of Atlanta! Of the 12 people that attended yesterday's meet up in London only five of them live in the city, and six came from countries other than England (three from the US, two from Malaysia, and one from Wales).

>57 kidzdoc: (Completely unrelated, I'm probably going to be in Atlanta in early January.)

>58 _Zoe_: Yay! That's in the busy part of our year, so there's essentially a 100% chance that I'll be there then. Once you know your dates let me know, and I can ask for at least a day or two off then.

>59 kidzdoc: Will do! :D

I've just updated my location on the wiki, only 3.5 years after I moved!

Finally went and added myself. And turns out I'm the first person from NJ to do so.