The Jury for Wikimania 2008 bids have met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania 2008 will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.
The Bids were assessed by a Jury[0] which included community members representing various geographical areas, and organisers of the previous conferences. The Jury used 12 criteria[1] to judge the bids, which were drawn up based on the Jury's previous experiences organising the conference and with input from a wide range of community concerns.
Alexandria was found to be particularly strong in the areas of reflecting the Wikimedia Foundation's roots in geo-diversity and multi-lingualism, of the very exciting nature of the proposed venue and its local facilities, and of the particularly advanced nature of the financial planning.
All three Bids were very strong in differing ways, each with stronger and weaker points. We would like to draw particular attention to the efforts of the team behind the Atlanta bid, which came in second place and was particularly commendable in the areas of providing in-facility accommodation and social space, and for doing great outreach to local Wikimedians. Their efforts could serve as an example to any team hoping to get the local community involved. The Cape Town bid was marked strongly by the Jury for cultural diversity, a particularly benign local environment, and efforts to secure local recognition and facilities. We'd especially like to congratulate Cape Town on providing our very first strong bid from the Southern Hemisphere.
A table of the results is given below. Each member of the jury had up to 60 points to allocate to the bids in each of the 12 categories, which they did after a period of discussion and careful deliberation.
Category Alexandria Atlanta Cape Town
Accommodation 251 298 71 Funding 264 224 152 Location 294 154 182 Internet Access 204 263 133 Local Laws 155 253 222 Press 232 235 153 Organizing Team 244 206 163 Rotation 305 55 260 Social Areas 222 258 140 Cost 289 206 125 Venue 323 158 139 Visas 243 109 263
Total 3026 2419 2003
Note that a 13th category, on personal preference, was polled but is not included as it had no significant effect on the result.
The Jury would like to thank all of those involved in bids, including those whose bids did not go forward to the final selection, for their efforts which combined to produce a competitive field.
We strongly encourage all those who bid this year, and those of you wondering whether your city could have done the same, to consider bidding for Wikimania 2009, for which the decision will begin very shortly. See the Wikimania 2009 page on meta[2] for further updates within the next few days.
We are especially looking forward to the Wikimedia Foundation collaborating with one of the most famous repositories of knowledge in the world, and emphasising the newly developing Wikimedia projects in Africa and the Middle East. We would like to encourage the entire community to support the Alexandria team over the coming year in producing an outstanding conference, and look forward to meeting as many of you as possible there.
On behalf of the Wikimania 2008 bid Jury.
[0] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2008/Jury Sue Gardner and Jan-Bart DeVreede abstained from voting. [1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania 2008/Judging criteria [2] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2009
On 09/10/2007, Aude audevivere@gmail.com wrote:
From what I've seen of the bid, I'm sure the organizers will do a great job.
Are any specific dates set for Wikimania 2008? Please let me know ASAP so I can plan accordingly.
-Aude
Wikimania-l mailing list Wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
18-21 July
Majorly wrote:
On 09/10/2007, *Aude* <audevivere@gmail.com mailto:audevivere@gmail.com> wrote:
>From what I've seen of the bid, I'm sure the organizers will do a great job. Are any specific dates set for Wikimania 2008? Please let me know ASAP so I can plan accordingly. -Aude _______________________________________________ Wikimania-l mailing list Wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l18-21 July
According to their page, the dates are estimated and subject to revision.
I'm too excited to write now indeed, so here's a quick mail :) I just want to say thank you to all the people who supported this bid and thanks to the jury for their choice which I believe was hard due to the 2 wonderful bids from Atlanta and Cape town. We would like to give special thanks for Bibliotheca Alexandrina and its head Dr. Ismail Serageldin and Dr. Noha Adly (ICT director) for the huge support we received through the last year since WM 07 bid, and their interest in helping out spreading free knowledge all over Egypt. We're all happy here for this choice and we promise you a wonderful Wikimania in Alexandria, don't miss it ;) We'll very much appreciate all the possible help you can offer guys and would like to thank all the people who offered to help since the announcement was out! I'm overwhelmed indeed. We're having a small meeting irl including the core bidding team after tomrrow. and we're having a grand meeting after Eid (end of Ramadan) here in Egypt (between 22-25 Oct) more updates will follow on this, stay tuned for online help details soon!
Thank you all again, and see you next Wikimania in Alexandria :)
Best regards, Mohamed Ibrahim [[Mido]] Lead coordinator for Wikimania 2008
On 10/9/07, Cary Bass cbass@wikimedia.org wrote:
Majorly wrote:
On 09/10/2007, *Aude* <audevivere@gmail.com mailto:audevivere@gmail.com> wrote:
>From what I've seen of the bid, I'm sure the organizers will do a great job. Are any specific dates set for Wikimania 2008? Please let me know ASAP so I can plan accordingly. -Aude _______________________________________________ Wikimania-l mailing list Wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l18-21 July
According to their page, the dates are estimated and subject to revision.
--
Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Phone: 727.231.0101 Fax: 727.258.0207 E-Mail: cbass@wikimedia.org
Wikimania-l mailing list Wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
Cary Bass wrote:
The Jury for Wikimania 2008 bids have met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania 2008 will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.
I'm offended that the desire to have Wikimania hop around the globe (rotation) trumps the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other civil rights (local laws). While visitors to Egypt are certainly not at the same risk, I refuse to spend any money in a country that -- as recently as 2004 -- sentenced someone to 17 years of prison and two years of hard labor for posting a personal ad on a gay website[1]. A blogger was imprisoned in 2007 for four years for "insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt."[2] Jimmy Wales even attended the Amnesty conference denouncing the censorship. No legal or cultural reforms since give me confidence that the situation has improved.
Wikimedia and its projects have an abundance of people from marginalized groups and political advocacy organizations participating at every level. A place that persecutes, censors, and prosecutes such groups under the banner of snuffing out "Satanism" is not a location that affirms the pluralism and intellectual freedom of Wikimedia.
People raised these objections early in the bidding process, but I have yet to see a response that extends beyond the immediate safety of conference attendees. (And even those responses failed to address the danger for transgender and transsexual community members.) Even if we don't risk anything ourselves, we should care about more than our own safety: where we hold a conference shows what we consider acceptable.
The "points" system that arrived at this decision strikes me as shallow and inhuman, a failed attempt at giving the process a veneer of objectivity. With arbitrary categories of equal weight, why should anyone expect it to yield a good result? Even then, all the public sees is a bunch of numbers without justifications or accountability. When I buy a car, I don't create the categories "exterior color," "interior color," "CD player," and "starts up" with equal weight, yet "social areas" weighed equally with "local laws" in the bidding process. How useful are these "social areas" to the parts of our community whose social activities, even appearance, include aspects that would be dangerous in public Egyptian life? How many "points" is their freedom worth?
Alexandria was once distinguished as being the site of the Great Library, but the Egypt of today has more in common with the society that burned the library than the one that built it. Don't expect to find me at Wikimania 2008 Alexandria.
Sincerely, David Strauss
[1] http://www.gaymiddleeast.com/country/egypt [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6724531.stm
On 10/9/07, David Strauss david@fourkitchens.com wrote:
Cary Bass wrote:
The Jury for Wikimania 2008 bids have met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania 2008 will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.
I'm offended that the desire to have Wikimania hop around the globe (rotation) trumps the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other civil rights (local laws). While visitors to Egypt are certainly not at the same risk, I refuse to spend any money in a country that -- as recently as 2004 -- sentenced someone to 17 years of prison and two years of hard labor for posting a personal ad on a gay website[1]. A blogger was imprisoned in 2007 for four years for "insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt."[2] Jimmy Wales even attended the Amnesty conference denouncing the censorship. No legal or cultural reforms since give me confidence that the situation has improved.
Wikimedia and its projects have an abundance of people from marginalized groups and political advocacy organizations participating at every level. A place that persecutes, censors, and prosecutes such groups under the banner of snuffing out "Satanism" is not a location that affirms the pluralism and intellectual freedom of Wikimedia.
People raised these objections early in the bidding process, but I have
As a jury member, I do not remember any comments from you on this subject, David; perhaps I missed them. At any rate, what are you trying to accomplish by sending this message after the winner was announced, and not before when we were discussing the bids?
Wikimania and Wikimedia are both global in scope, which means that while we can condemn censorship and loss of human rights everywhere we must also take into account a global range of values. Our projects focus specifically on free knowledge, and I expect that will be highlighted at the conference.
-- phoebe
phoebe ayers wrote:
On 10/9/07, David Strauss david@fourkitchens.com wrote:
Cary Bass wrote:
The Jury for Wikimania 2008 bids have met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania 2008 will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.
I'm offended that the desire to have Wikimania hop around the globe (rotation) trumps the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other civil rights (local laws). While visitors to Egypt are certainly not at the same risk, I refuse to spend any money in a country that -- as recently as 2004 -- sentenced someone to 17 years of prison and two years of hard labor for posting a personal ad on a gay website[1]. A blogger was imprisoned in 2007 for four years for "insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt."[2] Jimmy Wales even attended the Amnesty conference denouncing the censorship. No legal or cultural reforms since give me confidence that the situation has improved.
Wikimedia and its projects have an abundance of people from marginalized groups and political advocacy organizations participating at every level. A place that persecutes, censors, and prosecutes such groups under the banner of snuffing out "Satanism" is not a location that affirms the pluralism and intellectual freedom of Wikimedia.
People raised these objections early in the bidding process, but I have
As a jury member, I do not remember any comments from you on this subject, David; perhaps I missed them. At any rate, what are you trying to accomplish by sending this message after the winner was announced, and not before when we were discussing the bids?
Other people raised these objections during the bidding process; I didn't have to. Even if no one had brought the issue up, everyone on the voting team should have been aware enough of the problems to them under consideration without further prompting.
I thought it was a foregone conclusion that Egypt's human rights record would cripple the bid enough that it wouldn't win.
Wikimania and Wikimedia are both global in scope, which means that while we can condemn censorship and loss of human rights everywhere
So the "condemnation" amounts to docking a modest number of points for "local laws"?
we must also take into account a global range of values.
What is this supposed to mean? How can we balance condemnation with toleration?
Our projects focus specifically on free knowledge, and I expect that will be highlighted at the conference.
Even putting gay rights aside, Egypt's record of imprisoning political and religious dissidents is directly counter to affirming "free knowledge."
On 10/9/07, David Strauss david@fourkitchens.com wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
As a jury member, I do not remember any comments from you on this subject, David; perhaps I missed them. At any rate, what are you trying to accomplish by sending this message after the winner was announced, and not before when we were discussing the bids?
Other people raised these objections during the bidding process; I didn't have to. Even if no one had brought the issue up, everyone on the voting team should have been aware enough of the problems to them under consideration without further prompting.
And they were considered, just not to your satisfaction.
I thought it was a foregone conclusion that Egypt's human rights record
would cripple the bid enough that it wouldn't win.
There were no foregone conclusions; if there were, we wouldn't have had to have the bidding process, now would we?
I *do* agree with you that we need to rethink weighting of the criteria, and have some criteria weighted more strongly than others in future. However, I do think the voting system is a great improvement on previous systems, and I continue to reiterate that community feedback is welcome. For many attendees I've talked to at the last three conferences, rotation was indeed by far the biggest concern for them; however the jury also chose to consider a holistic set of criteria.
Also please note I'm not speaking on behalf of the jury in any way, just myself; I think we'd all agree that feedback is a good thing however.
-- phoebe
phoebe ayers wrote:
For many attendees I've talked to at the last three conferences, rotation was indeed by far the biggest concern for them; however the jury also chose to consider a holistic set of criteria.
Rotation is indeed important, but previous candidate cities haven't had significant human rights issues.
I could suggest holding Wikimedia on the moon. It would not be an appropriate response that attendees didn't cite presence of oxygen as an important concern at previous conventions.
DS> the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other civil rights
Just as the Egyptians don't hold us responsible for the actions of our governments, please do the same and give Alexandria a chance. I'm sure it will be a great conference. [[Give Peace a Chance]]
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