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