[Foundation-l] Re: Wikimania

Walter van Kalken a écrit: Walter van Kalken a écrit: wikimania. I am aware only of those who received a sponsorship from OSI, sponsorship which I coordinated. The name of the people may be found below. They received complete sponsorship from OSI to come to Wikimania. We have been in contact with OSI for several months now. We met with their board in december 2004. They would like to help development of our projects and help distribution of our content in particular on the african continent, which will be the topic of my talk at Wikimania. Over 30 people were considered and eventually contacted for this sponsorship. The final choice focused on speakers, on people known by OSI, on natives from developing or transition countries... and generally people living far way so unlikely to support their trip themselves. One important point was to make it possible that Wikimania is truely international and not only european, which is quite naturally occuring due to travel costs. The total budget of those people coming was estimated by Delphine and Sj. Delphine is currently securing the last plane tickets and making a final summary of how much all that will cost. Roughly 20 000 dollars. We are very glad OSI offered this opportunity to expand the circle of those coming. I must insist that neither wikimania, nor at a much smaller scale OSI sponsorship, were (still are) easy to manage. It requires a lot of work, a lot of implication, generally totally invisible from editors ... but this is important both to make a good Wikimania and to start some new opportunities to discuss and start collaborations. Aside from this, it will be proof that about a dozen volunteers can make something huge happen. In front of many sponsors, we appear as non necessarily credible, because our organisation is pretty much anarchic. It is very important for all of us that Wikimania is a success and important as well that we manage to find good people to invite to Wikimania in a very short timespan. It is proof we can make it. And proof we can be reliable. And potentially ready for bigger grants. I can not answer myself for other supports. Anthere --------- Mao Isaac Tall JC* Derakhshan Hossein Silva Rui Chaparro Enrique Bayazidis Isam Suárez Ascánder Soekatno Revo Arka Giri Ruiz Juan David Aineruhanga Milton Due to organisational issues, Mr Tall will probably not come though.