2007/2/6, Jakob Voss jakob.voss@nichtich.de:
Like the years before the planning is pretty chaotic. The place to look up is
1.) This public mailing list 2.) The public, official Wikimania wiki http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/ 3.) The internal Wikimania2007 4.) irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimania
Actually, Taipei team also has a google group and a Trac for local communication in Chinese. It is not good for international communication of committees between different time-zone and languages. So, thanks to Mr. Voss, now we have a centralized, internal mailing-list on wikimania@lists.wikimedia.de for committees.
I heard of rumors that the board was talking about whether to have
hacking days at wikimania at all and there is no Ivan in the program committee nor any other person with enough time and experience to organize hacking days. There were only thoughts and maybes (see the page http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planning/Hacking_days that you just brought back to life), but noone who said "yes, I will organize hacking days". Organization is pretty slow because of communication issues (language, timezone, two wikis, unclear responsibilities, long lag in creating minutes, spare free time, ...) - at the moment I can only tell that there are no concrete plans of any hacking days at Wikimania 2007. :-(
Thanks again to Mr. Voss for pointing out the problematic part of collaborative works oversea.
The following paragraphs are just some thoughts without practical issues, dear readers on this mailing-list could just ignore them. :)
To answer the worries and even the rumors, let me try to provide some kind of evidences. Hacking days will be there and are on the way of the direction that Mr. Brion Vibber pointed out. It looks like only some thoughts and maybes because there are a lot of negotiations under-table, e.g. I personally have to send many invitations to potential developers to ensure that there's also interesting side-project track along with MediaWiki core development. I also pushes a local hacking days as planed on http://taipedia.info/mediawiki/index.php/TaiwanHackathon It's my fault to leave them private in our google group and Trac. Therefore the Taipei team is going to have more reports and announcements in English, to polish the "PR" part.
For the question about experiences, since Tzu-Chiang, Frances and I work at Academia Sinica, we do have held several international confereces in last four years. Mr. Jakob Voss has also invited as the committee of WikiSym, I personally believe it is because that he is competence.
However, the Taipei team does not have experience on Wikimania. Wikimania is unique and young, clearly not many persons already have good experiences to do it.
So, it's my fault again that did not recruit Mr. Ivan Krstic at very first time. I did read Mr. Krstic's posts on the mailing-list and people's feedbacks about last year's Hacking Days, and the reason why I did not ask for help from Mr. Krstic early is because of the nature of Eastern, or more specificly, Taiwanese; you know, it's just like a culture shock: I think too much to decide not bothering too many people and embarrass to ask whom had received some negative feedbacks (although they're small) -- I'm afraid to make people unconfertable. Well, all of those thoughts are just mistakes, we still appreciate deeply with Mr. Krstic's helps, especially we are trying to build Indico for CfP of this year.
The last thing I have to say is, about the time issue. I know myself it that kind of person who is too naive to pending reports and announcements until "everything" is ready. It conflicts to the law of open source: release early, release often. That's the main reason why I use Trac to tracking my tasks and apply the design of Hacking Days plan to a local event first: I do believe it will be a kind of "test" to avoid more risks on Wikimania Hacking Days.
It's my lesson to walk in the fine line between this ideal approach and my childlike nature. Thank you for all your suggestions and kindness. Hope we will learn to be professional and make Wikimania 2007 successful.
Cheers, Mike