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