On 21 June 2010 19:54, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> There have been post-mortems every year (with varying degrees of
> formality and levels of participation); these have resulted in a
> handful of private reports to the Foundation & within the org team
> (and many more sets of informal notes). Basically, every year the
> organizers have sat down, sometimes with other people and sometimes
> not, and talked about the conference afterwards; ideally this gets
> written up. I personally have four sets of these notes tucked away in
> various notebooks, documents, etc....
>
> What there has never been is a publicly available report, or summation
> of these meetings, that anyone ever got around to posting for the rest
> of the world to see -- I think that's the part where exhaustion comes
> into play :)

The idea of a post-mortem is to learn for the future, so it isn't
really worth having one if you don't publish the results for future
teams can learn from them.

It's actually also useful for all the people involved to have a final discussion about what has happened; and the results of these conversations have gotten translated in various ways: to the bid criteria, to the documentation that is being built on meta, to the structures that the WMF has set up for supporting Wikimania, etc. But I am not disagreeing with you -- at all! -- that a formal public post-mortem report after the conference would be very helpful. I'm just explaining what has actually happened in practice :)

-- phoebe