<quote who="Pine W" date="Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 06:03:03PM -0700">

Mako, please do look into the possibility of UW hosting!

I've just sent an email to these folks:

https://depts.washington.edu/uwconf/faculty_staff.html

I suppose we'll need to know:

- Number of people we expect? - Will we want University housing? - Dates (presumably, these will during a University break or summer quarter)

I'll add that there's no real reason that I need to be the bottleneck for this. I'm still new at UW so I'm probably starting from a similar place as others.

Regards, Mako

<quote who="Pine W" date="Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:40:46AM -0700">

Thanks. Quick guesses:

100 to 500 participants Yes to UW housing At least one common meal for all participants on Saturday Probably summer of 2016 or 2017 Events from Friday evening through Sunday mid-afternoon with arrivals Friday morning and departures late Sunday. We may expand the schedule depending on the level of interest in a pre-conference hackathon or education workshop.

It would be great if you and Peaceray take the lead on this.

I'm assuming we'd be able to get funding for this. The thing that would be useful to know from the NYU organizers is how much money they expect this to cost.

Later, Mako

I think 400 attendees would be a rather overoptimistic estimate for the NYC attendance this year, but by 2016 hopefully WikiConference USA will be able to grow to this size or larger.

I agree that a good partnership with a university that can waive some costs is critical, unless you have much more money on hand than we did.

Certainly you should be able to get a grant at least comparable to the NYC grant from the WMF, and probably by this time there will be other funding sources that can contribute on a larger scale as well.

It is never too early to start planning and identifying potential partner universities, though.

Thanks, Pharos

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.com wrote:

Hello,

I was one of the organizers from the NYC conference and I am from Seattle.

First, let me confirm as Pine said that this is discussion for the future and likely there is a perpetual offer of funding if Seattle would wish to host the conference. In NYC the format was as follows:

• three day conference
• 400 attendees (I think), with a third attending 3 days, a third 2

days, and a third 1 day

• 5 conference tracks, all volunteer presenters
• all volunteer planning team, with some hired staff per venue

requirements

• hired catering
• WiFi necessary for everyone
• Running the conference was budgeted to 13k, but I think it ran to

16k, and no one had any ideas at all on making this cheaper; likely we could have requested and gotten more

• We awarded 22k in travel scholarships which funded flights and

hostel accommodations, which again was the cheapest acceptable way to do this

• Our venue rental cost would have been 48k to be at a university in

Manhattan. This was donated to us by the university, and if we had to pay for that, I am not sure what we would have done.

• Because of accessibility and diversity concerns, we did not charge

admission to join the conference and accepted everyone who showed up. We did ask for registration, and we would have turned people away had we gone over capacity. We did warn some late registrants that we might not have room for them.

Most cash from the conference came from the Wikimedia Foundation. < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/WM_US-NYC/WikiConference_USA_2014

...

We did some fundraising too.

If there were more discussion about hosting this conference in Seattle, I could help Wikimedia Cascadia build on and copy the preparation and planning that was done in NYC.

I should also say that while WM NYC did almost all of the event planning, WM DC managed the awarding of travel scholarships. It helps to have partners in this.

The biggest barrier to hosting a conference is getting a place to do it. If any university in the area would help host then that would be best.

In the past I reached out to the organizers of Seattle InfoCamp about combining their conference with a WikiConference. I know they have been looking for help organizing and managing their event, and as I feel it is so closely aligned with Wikimedia community values, I have long wished that our communities could collaborate.

It seems that this year their conference is cancelled, or rather postponed until next year. http://seattle.infocamp.org/ Since they are having a bit of management crisis, now might be a good time to check back with them and see if they would partner with us Wikimedians. They already have about five years experience running our size of conferences in Seattle, and it might be that if we combined our two sort of shaky communities together then we could be very strong and organized together. At least it is an option.

yours,

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 3:50 AM, Benj. Mako Hill mako@atdot.cc wrote:

...

<quote who="Pine W" date="Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:40:46AM -0700"> > Thanks. Quick guesses: > > 100 to 500 participants > Yes to UW housing > At least one common meal for all participants on Saturday > Probably summer of 2016 or 2017 > Events from Friday evening through Sunday mid-afternoon with arrivals > Friday morning and departures late Sunday. We may expand the schedule > depending on the level of interest in a pre-conference hackathon or > education workshop. > > It would be great if you and Peaceray take the lead on this.

I'm assuming we'd be able to get funding for this. The thing that would be useful to know from the NYU organizers is how much money they expect this to cost.

Later, Mako

-- Benjamin Mako Hill http://mako.cc/

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto

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<quote who="Benj. Mako Hill" date="Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 05:51:07AM -0700">

I'm going to meet with some people from the UW Conference Organizing center. I'm not sure we'll want to work with them, but it is certainly an option and they can probably let me know what the options are.

I had a quick conversation with folks at UW conference services about this. Here is the basic run down.

Generally speaking, departments have some amount of space they can use and schedule as they wish. I have maybe 10 rooms in my department (Communication) that I can schedule like this with no cost and no real need to ask permission. Unfortunately, the biggest of these holds maybe 100 people so we couldn't host WikiConference USA in the department.

Our options for space would be:

- Find a larger department with more classroom space at their disposal who are willing to "donate" it. I have no idea which departments are big enough but the Law School and Business School comes to mind.

- Pay for event space at the HUB. The building is brand new and it's really fantastic for events. The largest ballroom for maybe 500-600 people would cost about $1000 a day. Smaller rooms would be much less. Give the budgets we've been talking about, this might not be a bad direction to go.

In terms of housing we could host people in new dorms that have been built but it would have to be around the school year. Doing it the week of graduation is a very bad idea. We can look at the 2016 academic calendar to get a sense for how would do this.

Conference services at UW here can do a whole bunch of the organizing and logistic for us but we could also decide which things we want them to do and which things we want to do ourselves. They would charge us something and this would clearly vary based on what we want them do. We could also organize the entire thing at UW without them. I thought them that, at the very least, we would handle the program and most other stuff on-wiki in the normal way. They could be there though to do nametags and registration, help with AV, or whatever. It's really up to us.

If we want to get more serious about this, we can try to work with them to figure out a more serious quote. At the very least, I think doing it at UW would be doable. Given other commitments, I couldn't organize all of this, but I could help lend my name and position to make UW a possibility if others wanted to lead the way here.

Later, Mako

Thanks for the info, Mako. Let's keep this option in mind if we agree to make a bid to host.

Pine On Sep 22, 2014 8:04 PM, "Jason Moore" anotherbelieverwp@gmail.com wrote:

Thank you for sharing your preliminary findings, BMH. I must say, you really present a good option as far as cost goes, especially when compared to the cost for other event spaces.

Jason

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Benj. Mako Hill mako@atdot.cc wrote:

...

<quote who="Benj. Mako Hill" date="Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 05:51:07AM -0700"> > I'm going to meet with some people from the UW Conference Organizing > center. I'm not sure we'll want to work with them, but it is certainly > an option and they can probably let me know what the options are.

I had a quick conversation with folks at UW conference services about this. Here is the basic run down.

Generally speaking, departments have some amount of space they can use and schedule as they wish. I have maybe 10 rooms in my department (Communication) that I can schedule like this with no cost and no real need to ask permission. Unfortunately, the biggest of these holds maybe 100 people so we couldn't host WikiConference USA in the department.

Our options for space would be:

• Find a larger department with more classroom space at their disposal who are willing to "donate" it. I have no idea which departments are big enough but the Law School and Business School comes to mind.

• Pay for event space at the HUB. The building is brand new and it's really fantastic for events. The largest ballroom for maybe 500-600 people would cost about $1000 a day. Smaller rooms would be much less. Give the budgets we've been talking about, this might not be a bad direction to go.

In terms of housing we could host people in new dorms that have been built but it would have to be around the school year. Doing it the week of graduation is a very bad idea. We can look at the 2016 academic calendar to get a sense for how would do this.

Conference services at UW here can do a whole bunch of the organizing and logistic for us but we could also decide which things we want them to do and which things we want to do ourselves. They would charge us something and this would clearly vary based on what we want them do. We could also organize the entire thing at UW without them. I thought them that, at the very least, we would handle the program and most other stuff on-wiki in the normal way. They could be there though to do nametags and registration, help with AV, or whatever. It's really up to us.

If we want to get more serious about this, we can try to work with them to figure out a more serious quote. At the very least, I think doing it at UW would be doable. Given other commitments, I couldn't organize all of this, but I could help lend my name and position to make UW a possibility if others wanted to lead the way here.

Later, Mako

-- Benjamin Mako Hill http://mako.cc/

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto

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Yes, I think the consensus is that we anticipate that in 2016 we will feel ready to host Wikiconference USA in Seattle. 2015 feels too soon, especially with our limited volunteer resources, and with our current situation of no budget, no contractors, and no staff. I think it's realistic to believe that we will have more capacity in 2016.

Pine

*This is an Encyclopedia* https://www.wikipedia.org/

*One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of our past, in which we must delve The well of our future,The clear water we must leave untainted for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not know.*

*—Catherine Munro*

On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Benj. Mako Hill mako@atdot.cc wrote:

Greetings fellow Cascadian Wikimedians!

I was just chatting with Frank Schulenburg and Renée LeVesque from the Wiki Education foundation. They are involved in helping do some of the organization for WikiConference USA 2015 right now and trying to nail down venues.

Seattle is listed as a possible venue on this page:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiConference_USA

I told them that based on my reading of the conversation on this list, there was interest in considering hosting Wikiconference USA in 2016 but a sense that we wanted to host some more local/regional events and get established in 2015 and did not want to be seriously considered as a host for this coming year.

If somebody is really dying to help organize the full deal over the next months, speak up and I will let them know. Otherwise, I'll go ahead summarize my reading of the general temperature in our group on that page.

Regards, Mako

-- Benjamin Mako Hill http://mako.cc/

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto

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