Cary Bass wrote: Absolutely. This was the subject of an informal post-mortem after Wikimania Boston, and I'm happy to see that we have gone this way. Doing this in the fall should be just fine. Remember that in the past year both 2008 and 2009 had to be allocated on a catch-up basis. Now we go back to one decision per year. There is an advantage to an early start in that it allows the new city to put together and fund the team members who will be at the preceding Wikimania. No matter when the decision is made, there will always be procrastinators who wait for the last minute to make their submissions anyway. Ec. PS: re Buenos Aires: The site still shows a "proposed" date of August 28-30. Has this been firmed up? My reason for asking is that my wife has agreed to come with me to Buenos Aires, and she wants to slot in her vacation time at work before someone else claims that spot. Ray

Hi Cary, thanks for bringing this up. I agree definitely that bringing the dates afront is a good thing, even though not all potential has been used yet. However, I also see some disadvantages of bringing the dates forth too much. The main argument here is the loose of momentum *after* the bidding process. Momentum is important, and to start a bidding process almost two years in advance is probably too much for an organization of mainly volunteers where a lot of people don't know what they will be doing in one year time even. Being on a probably bidding team, I think having the bidding process in october/november is not going to work well. We are already orienting, and to make a good bid, we want to offer a sound financial and organizational basis. However, this costs time, as easy as that. This also requires internal approval within chapters if they participate in the bidding process, which also takes time. It will be very tough to find sufficient willing potential sponsors and supportive organisations more then 1,5 year in advance of the conference. We did discuss this quite extensively already actually internally (within the NL bidding team), and concluded that it would be nearly impossible for us to compete if the bidding process would take place this early in the year. Please also bear in mind that some chapters, especially in Europe, are organizing their national conference in the fall (this time that is an appropriate word to use ;-) ) of this year, and since there is quite some overlap in the people, that would potentially cause major problems. So to conclude, please let's not rush things, and offer people from all over the world to create a great bid, with a good basis. Especially a bid that will after all also be able to be executed as planned, which is harder if there is more rush in the creation of the bid. However, I would plea to make the bidding process somewhat longer. Start somewhat earlier with it, and have larger spans. Let's try to finish it in March, but already start it in November or December. This would offer the best of both worlds I believe. Also I believe that if a group of people wants to take the momentum from this Wikimania, they will. With or without a short deadline. People don't need a deadline to work on a bid. Best regards, Lodewijk Gelauff ps: to be clear, I am active in Wikimedia Nederland, and working on a Dutch bid for Wikimania 2010. I might be a bit biased with what problems *we* think to encounter with an early deadline. :) 2008/7/11 Cary Bass <cbass(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: