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