Hello all,
Although it is already some time ago that the Wikimedia Conferentie
Nederland (WCN) was held in Utrecht, Netherlands, I would like to give
a short overview of the conference. The conference was mostly in Dutch
language, for a Dutch-speaking public of Wikians and was orginized on
september 2nd 2006 in conference center Regardez La Vie in Utrecht,
Netherlands and was very much sponsored by Kennisnet, the Dutch
organization that has as goal to use the possibilities of ICT in the
Dutch education as much as possible, that also sponsors the servers in
Amsterdam and that is stimulating the use of wiki's in the Dutch
education.
About 45 people attended to the conference, exclusive press etc, of
which we had three people who were present for a smaller or larger
period. In total there were two planary and twelve smaller sessions,
of which two workshops, two/three discussions and further some very
interesting presentations with the subjets Easy Timeline, Wikibooks,
Wikidata, References on Wikipedia, Conventions on Wikipedia,
Constructive collaboration, pywikipediabot, vandalfighting, scalable
vector graphics, Wikimedia 201 and last but not least some insights
from Wikimedia Deutschland by Kurt Jansson, their president.
The conference was for the whole afternoon, and directly afterwards
there was a well visited dinner for interested people.
Contacts were made, people met other Wikians for the first time, and
discovered that the others were not as bad as online, leart things
from and to each other and most important to me, were able to
enthousiast each other even further, so cooporation was made better. I
can advise others to orginize this kind of local conferences as well
in the future, although it might be wiser to keep some more time
between Wikimania and the local conference. I am working on writing
down what went wrong, what should have a lot of attention, what to
thing of when orginizing this kind of things etc. Hopefully others can
learn of our errors and almost-errors :-) and will it be easier next
time. (I hope there will be!)
Greetings from the Netherlands,
Lodewijk Gelauff, co-orginizer of the WCN