Dear Mr. Vibber and Ms. Ayers,
Let me reply your advises one by one in the following, along with Ms. Ayers' statements.
2007/2/12, phoebe ayers brassratgirl@gmail.com:
a) have more excellent formal technical talks and panels in the main program -- but this means that all of you interested in the subject will have to *submit* talks :) (the cfp will be open soon, hopefully).
WIKIWYG and CLEF WiQA funders have both accepted my invitation. That is, we will have at least these two topics in the main conference program. For CfP, web maintenance team is trying to establish Indico and getting helps from Ivan, hopefully it will be open soon, yes.
For more concrete technical programs of main conference, we are roughly following past Wikimania topics and then polish them. Basically I am trying to organize human resources from Web API perspectives. This is also current direction of Hacking Days "Extra," i.e. the parallel track of Hacking Days beyond MediaWiki itself.
b) if the core developers want to plan a closed, invite-only meeting,
they should be able to do so before or after the main conference (getting in touch with the accomodation/registration coordinator would probably be a good idea for timing issues) but this wouldn't be the same thing as a general hacking days.
For MediaWiki core development, it is an invite-only hack-athon. We would like to invite MediaWiki committers formally via MediaWiki foundation later, and keep it self-organized by developers themselves. What we can do for MediaWiki core developers is preparing a quite space with high-speed network, confertable seats, enough foods and drinks, etc.
For more closed meetings before or after the main conference, coordinators may provide clear information about suitable places to meet and to stay. For example, if developers want to have a BOF in the evening, we may order the best cafe with beers and wireless for them.
c) we need good ideas in how to integrate ideas from the tech talks,
the more limited meeting, and those with interest in hacking mediawiki into a smaller, more open hacking days.
To hold a parallel Hacking Days "Extra" with realistic productivity, we need a series of "unit tests" to prove the "design" of Hacking Days plan. That's why I also take charge of a local hacking days and an open source conference in Taipei. They are http://taipedia.info/mediawiki/index.php/TaiwanHackathon (in English) and http://osdc.tw/ (in Chinese), respectively.
I am looking forward to any concrete question (and even challenge) about what's the best "evaluation" method to ensure the Hacking Days can reach good coverage and accuracy both.
I know there are also a lot of arguments on this mailing list and wikitech-l. The replies are going to appear soon.
Cheers, Mike