A Wikimania committee would be good, but even better would be some continuing organiser resource. There are lots of really suitable potential venues out there if we could only reduce the minimal role of the local organisation.
The ideal Wikimania venue is in a country a medium or longhaul flight from the last two years venues, where there are few or no visa barriers to entry, tolerance of the various diverse sorts of people who attend Wikimania and which is relatively cheap when you aggregate the costs of transport, venue and simply being there. If you add sufficient local Wikimedians to put a viable bid together then you have to make compromises.
In the 80s I used to go to an annual conference that wandered round the UK, most of the organisation of which was done by the same people regardless of where the event was held. I think that would be a good model for Wikimania. Yes of course it would be nice to have a local team, to have one thread of discussions in the local language, to have local volunteers check out some of the venues and arrange some local speakers. But people who edit an encyclopaedia are not necessarily people who want to print visitor badges and bargain with hotel chains and airlines. I suspect that if the WMF employed a conference organiser to organise Wikimania it would be an investment that paid for itself in opening up cheaper venues and reducing community burnout.
WSC
On 23 April 2013 06:17, James Forrester jdforrester@gmail.com wrote:
Dear all,
A small group of long-time Wikimaniacs have been working on the perrenial plan to produce a "Wikimania Committee" - a community group who would help steer Wikimania from year to year, advising each local hosting team and ensuring that the processes are open, transparent and community-led.
Here are our drafts of what we think we'd want the committee to be like, a charter, and the resolution which we're submitting to the WMF Board:
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Committee
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Committee/Charter
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_resolutions/Wikimania_Committee
Comments are very welcome; we're trying to get this done fairly quickly, and of course we will iterate these plans as we get feedback and hopefully more forward on the oft-stalled next steps.
J.
James D. Forrester jdforrester@gmail.com [[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal capacity)
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