Florence Devouard wrote:
One think I did not like
1) air conditionning is tooooooo low.
It's hard to satisfy everybody on that sort of thing. I;ve been at
meetings before where half the room complains that it's too hot, and the
other half complains that it's too cold.
I think we need to work further on social events. In
Frankfurt, people
loved dancing at the Wikimania party. We should have this in all
wikimania parties. After the movie :-) We need two rooms. One to chat
and one to dance.
Yes. In Frankfurt I was one of he group who went downstairs which was
not really a part of the venue. The one thing we can be sure of is tha
Wikipedians love to talk about Wikipedia, often very late into the
night! :-) As a non-dancer this is one point where the site in Boston
worked out better, though I regret not taking the time to look through
some of the very interesting exhibits. As for the movie, one or two
would have been enough; the videos could be made available in a separate
room during the conference for those who are interested without needing
to feel that they are a part of a captive audience.
I would like to extend a thank you to specific groups.
Registration
Not much mentionned, but I did not hear many complaints and it seems it
worked well :-)
A word should be put in for the facility staff, especially those at the
main desk who frequently had to fill in little slips of paper for us to
give to the taxi drivers. At one point when it was raining, and I was
standing outside the main entrance to the "lodgement building" one of
them brough me an umbrella so that I could go to the residence
building. The little things that go beyond a person's job description
are really appreciated.
Installation and clean-up
I saw most of the installation during the board retreat. All seems to go
smoothly. As for clean-up, I just did not see it. I am sure many people
worked on that, and still, it was invisible. Amazing.
The staff there seems to have a lot of experience with the transition
between conferences, and with juggling things when unrelated groups are
using the complex at the same time. I did wonder what happened to the
yellow vertical banners; had it been possible I'm sure some people would
have been happy to bring one home as a souvenir.
Overall, the words that come to my mouth are efficiency
and kindness.
The organization team offered us a great Wikimania. Thank you to all !
Add to this the provision of a generator to avoid overloading the
building's electrical system by our highly wired crowd, and providing a
quality coffee maker for the breakfast room. It was not part of the
regular furnishings of the breakfast room.
(every year, it becomes a more difficult challenge for
the next one...)
Ant
Each will have its own character. Each year's organizers need to run
with a plan that is uniquely their own. The spontaneous appreciation
that has been expressed for the Taipei Wikimania was not there for
either of the other two. It's also important that this not be set as
the kind of impossible standard which future organizers must meet. That
would be putting an undue burden on them. For most of us the important
thing was meeting with other like-minded people. In Frankfurt it was
putting faces to the people we met on-line; beginning with Boston it
became an opportunity to meet old friends.
Ec