A designated person to help would be good. Someone to
help with travel and
visa issues, especially.
As I wrote in other places before, based on the Haifa team's experience -
there has to be some one-stop-shop person (on WMF staff or not, but
committed to this task) who could answer all questions the winning team will
have (and it will!) or point to those who could answer them. There will
always be a strong local aspect to many difficult issues (such as visas,
catering, local government relations), but there are things like how to get
the new wiki to be formed, what mailing lists to start subscribing to, how
to operate the OTRS queues, who to ask for help with registration site and
scholarship application/review site and how to set them up -- all of these
are things that currently the teams just have to try to learn/guess from
scratch. At least we did. And that's quite silly.
Harel