I fully agree with Manuel. As a clarification:

* I don't see a Wikimania as a place for newbies or a thing I'd recommend them to visit. It is more of a site where to talk about engaging new users and educating long time contributors on the stuff that may not be known in their community. That "new"-user stuff doesn't meant the event itself must be for newcomers. ;)
* Indeed, Wikimania should concentrate on a well done fewer things and for bringing the international community together. There doesn't have to be 1000+ participants for that (maybe even 500-700 max). In that sense, less is more. This is what I meant under "smaller locally and bigger globally".
* When the event will take place in many locations around the globe (that is one bigger Wikimania and a lot of local meetings around it), then all of thous smaller local events may have their own goals. More events will lead to more human interactions and to lot more impact. Each location may still focus on what it needs the most.
* Each of thous local events can serve as a bridge to bring new people in. Only for the organizing part it will be bringing in a little bit different set of people (but in the Estonia, thous are currently the ones we need the most, and that is why I am interested of setting up a bid).

Ivo

2014-08-13 23:45 GMT+03:00 Manuel Schneider <manuel.schneider@wikimedia.ch>:
Hi Ivo et. al.,

Am 13.08.2014 22:28, schrieb Ivo Kruusamägi:
> Even thou the movement grows and gets older, it also needs to renew. It
> has to attract new users to continue growing as rapidly it has in the
> past and it has to set up new ideas on how it can be pushed forward for
> the new ones to even have something to work on. As such, more emphasis
> for new users might be a good idea.

[...]

> We have the technology to make Wikimania even bigger and to bring it
> closer to people. Why not to use it? Maybe we could test it out in 2016?

I agree with your ideas but have a different perspective:

1) to bring in new community members etc. we need a more sustainable
approach. A Wikimania can only have a local influence on this, not a
global. Newbies need a local community, a group where they can become a
team member of, which carry them through their hurdles.

Therefore I am confident that a local WikiCon is the right and better
place for this. It is smaller, more familiar, the newbies will find
people from their area which will be around later.

2) I think that making Wikimania bigger and bigger is not the right
approach. Concentrate on a few things and do them right. Like local
conferences can focus on their community and their work inside the
projects, Wikimania should focus on strategy and bringing the
international community together.
Since several years attending Wikimania is a very exhaustive endeavor.

I would never recommend a newbie to attend Wikimania in order to become
part of the movement. It is a good way for newbies who have already
started working on our projects (and thus have their local friends
inside the movements) to learn more and look beyond the places they
currently work, though.

So, conclusion is that we shouldn't overload Wikimania and rather have
more local conferences which have different measures of success -
bringing new people into the project and help existing community to do
actual content work. (been there, done that already)

/Manuel
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