Hi all,

My comments below express my personal opinion only, which is not necessarily representative of the opinion of WM Israel or of the WM Haifa local team.

As someone who attended Wikimania 2007, 2010 and is now spending countless hours together with other team members on preparing WM 2011, I wanted to raise a somewhat controversial idea, namely that in future years, Wikimania will be held once every two years (biannually) and not annually.

The reason I'm saying this is not only the huge effort that has to be invested by the local team year after year, but what is potentially a lack of strong bids to host Wikimania 2012, as witnessed by this year's jury. Even if strong bids emerge for 2012 eventually, I'm sure that in years to come the problem will repeat and again we might face a situation where there are no strong bids at all.

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).

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 is not very practical. I hope that eventually, someone will have the decision power and the courage to take this decision - if not for 2012 (I'm not advocating to skip WM2012 specifically, that's not my agenda), then in the future.


Your thoughts?


Yours,

Harel Cain
Wikimania 2011 local team (but speaking personally)