I agree to some extent, a biannual event is an eventuality we have to consider. But would making it biannual have any effect on the quality of the bids, the benefit of having such a diverse community implies that the two teams hosting consecutive events might not be affected by each other at all. The bids might not improve even if the event became biannual. The bidding process lasts for months, the planning stage probably even longer, awarding more time to a bidding team might not improve the quality of the bids. The biggest benefit I would assume, would be providing a team that has already won the bid, more time to prepare for the event.

Again, I would take this opportunity to bring up an earlier suggestion of a Wikimania committee, an oversight committee or an advisory group could improve the bidding process and transfer some of the burden of planning to a specialized body. The experience gained from every year could be retained within the committee, this I believe might have the largest impact on the quality and the frequency of the bids. This might standardized the process and offload a lot of burden from the host team.


Regards


Theo


On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Finne Boonen <hennar@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 12:44, Lodewijk <lodewijk@effeietsanders.org> wrote:
>> To me, the lack of strong bids is an indicator that holding a big,
>> expensive and complex international conference in a changing location year
>> after year is not very realistic in the long term - and Wikimania is just
>> becoming ever more big, expensive and complex (for example, WM2011 will see
>> at least three side events preceding/co-locating with it).

Maybe the problem is that every conference tries to do better/bigger
then the previous ones? Which can quickly lead to 'too
big/complicated'

>> Few international organizations do that. In fact, many international
>> conferences such as the International Congress of Mathematicians are held
>> every 4 years! I don't think it will be a bad sign for the Wikimedia
>> movement / foundation to decide to hold Wikimania every two years, just a
>> realistic understanding on its part that the tradition of annual Wikimanias

However, most other fields have several conferences a year where
people meet each other. I'm not sure we have enough events that allow
real international 'mingling' to take place. In my experience most
conferences we have are very local events, and there is real benefit
from interacting in person with a wider community then the local one.

Finne

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