@AMuigai, thanks for filing this!

First, we should talk more about your plans for contacting these users since there's a potential privacy issue here. Knowing that a particular editor is located in Kenya is sensitive data (except in cases, likely the minority, where they have already disclosed their location), and a talk page message inviting them to an event in Nairobi would be outing their country of residence, which of course we cannot do!

On the other hand, I can think of a couple things you could do:

• Manually look at the user pages of users on the list and if they've disclosed their location, send them to a talk page invitation. However, this could be quite time-consuming and there's the risk that we accidentally send an invitation to someone who hasn't disclosed.
• If the user has given an email address (which something like 50% of registered users do; I expect that the more active the user, the higher the rate), then we can pull that address and email them an invitation. The risk here is lower since we'd be using a private communication channel, but we'd need to be careful not to expose one user's address to another (for example, this could happen if we sent a mass message without using BCC) and not to leave these addresses stored in other systems (for example, if we used Gmail, we'd want to delete the sent message after the event). Depending on the number of people you want to contact, we might also run into problems with Gmail mail limits.

Also, can you give us a better idea of the deadline? The offsites start the last week of April, so would it be sufficient to get you the data by the end of March?

We began by looking manually, and it became time consuming, so I raised this task.
Respecting the privacy of our editors is important to us. If someone has made public where they live, and how they can be contacted, we can reach out to them right?

Dates: Mid March would be great.

@AMuigai it would probably be a good idea to have WMF-Legal take a look at this before you start contacting anyone. As @nshahquinn-wmf pointed out, there are probably some privacy law implications. Not only is the data sensitive, but in this case there are potential problems with using emails in the manner you describe.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.