Dear all,
it is my pleasure to announce that the jury has been able to come up with an
intermediate result - and I would like to share with you the fact that two
finalist bids have been selected. All bids have been examined and discussed
at three public IRC meetings and several private conversations, and we have
come to the conclusion that we will now focus our attention on the two bids
with in our opinion the highest potential: Hong Kong and London (in
alphabetical
order).
We were blessed this year with a strong field of bids, and I would
like to extend
our sincere thanks to the bidding teams of Bristol, Naples and Surakarta
for their extensive and well worked out bids - but also the effort they put
into answering our extensive enquiries. I think all three bids had very
good qualities and their strong points and with work could make a wonderful
and very competing bid in a future year.
This decision has been made based on the primary evaluation of the bid quality,
with a special focus to suitability of the Venue, Accommodation and the
reliability and viability of the local team (did we have the feeling they
were up for the task). We will not be sharing an extensive reasoning at
this point for each bid - but I think we can give feedback after the final
decision about the winning bid has been made, in private communication.
So what is next? The two candidates will be reviewed more extensively, we will
assess the risks and whether they will actually be able to live up to the
promises more thoroughly. We may be needing a few days extra compared to
the original timeline, but hopefully not too much.
With kind regards, for the Wikimania 2013 jury,
Lodewijk Gelauff