Wikimania 2011 has come, yet again another location in the middle-east. It seems to me that every major populated geographic region has a multitude of sites which could create viable wikimania candidacies— and this has certainly been supported by the past applications. A leading application takes an enormous amount of work, expenditure of political energy, etc. on the part of the proposing team— work that could perhaps be applied to advancing the Wikimedia mission in other ways for candidacies which are ultimately fruitless. I believe that if you were to take the best candidate from each region and compare among them you'd find them all to be excellent options and ultimately end up choosing based little details and preferences, often ones mostly outside of the control of the applicants. Accordingly I believe it would be better if we pre-announced a preferred geography for the candidacies each year. Effort could then be conserved for producing really excellent proposals in those years when a candidacy is most likely to be successful. This could also be expected to result in better applications. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l