Hi Brion,
Thanks for asking about the hacking days. You wrote:
We'd like to have the techs a little more involved in Hacking Days planning than last year; Ivan did a fantastic job at arranging a tech-themed mini-conference, but it wasn't really what we expected and I think it ended up less productive and more stressful and hectic than it should have been because of that.
Who should we be talking to on the program committee or whatever to make sure everybody's on the same page? I want everybody to both have a blast and get some stuff done at the same time. :)
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
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. :-(
Greetings, Jakob