Ed: Yes, my suggestion was more or less what Harry described, a lot more informal than the Committee and able to answer more practical questions.

The committee is mostly just the previous organisers. Any way you cut it, it'll still be the same people. The committee can and does answer practical questions, but it seems the kind of people who step up to do Wikimanias don't tend to need it that much.

I expect the main issue is variable levels of commitment/ownership in the organising team.

Edward Saperia
Founder Newspeak House
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On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 5:58 AM, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Ellie! Sounds like a very productive step!

Chris

On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 12:26 AM, Ellie Young <eyoung@wikimedia.org> wrote:


On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 11:23 AM, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Well this thread turned out bigger (and much more productive) than I expected!


To my mind, Wikimania continuing to happen every year is a minor miracle, and one that's only possible with the hard work and dedication of lots of people.

However, it's a miracle that isn't without its problems. The most obvious problem to my mind is that there is a very mixed quality of actual conference programme, and without clear objectives (or at least not consistent objectives). The Wikimedia Conference, by contrast, has a much clearer alignment of the programme with a set of goals, and work happens to follow up before and after the conference. 

The second problem is that the responsibilities for governance and management of the conference are really very unclear. We have the Wikimania Committee, we have the local team (and in some cases a local chapter who may or may not be working closely with the bid team), we have the Programme Committee and we have the WMF. (Actually we have the WMF at least twice, as the priorities of the WMF team involved in organising the conference don't always seem to align with those of the rest of the organisation).  

 

In my view, the most useful thing for all these groups to do is to work out who is actually responsible for what, and document it, in public.

T
​his is an excellent suggestion.  It is not unclear to me how things work having been involved with coordination among the various 'players' for the past few years.  The Handbook is out of date as well.   So I will take an action item to start revising this and making it clearer to everyone about the structure, organization, etc for the community at large.     This is especially necessary as we move forward with next steps for 2018 in the coming months (working on this with WMF and Committee so we are all in alignment about the future, and we can better enable  prospective future hosts/organizers to engage with us.)


 



Chris

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Ellie Young
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