On 9/25/06, Arne Klempert klempert@gmail.com wrote:
We really have to find a way to avoid such inevitable (and probably huge) frustration among teams and sponsors. Perhaps a list of preferred continents could help, or a much earlier involvement of the jury, whatever. Please don't encourage Wikipedians all over the world to waste their time (and the good will of sponsors) again.
Arne is perfectly right in the description of the problem. On the other hand, we are not the first organisation to discover it. Other events (please ignore differences in size by orders of magnitude) such as the Olympic Games do have a candidate city evaluation as well. If one city is chosen, the effort put into 20 other proposals is void.
There is of couse a good reason for the procedure we are currently doing: How do we know which effort is worth before doing it? How do we find the best location that fits our needs? In the long run, you end up having more or less the same system, only by different names.
And there is another issue: How to we keep people working for Wikimania even if "their city" is not chosen this time. It is not wasting the goodwill of companies (especially multinational corporations) to ask if their offer for sponsorship still applies to the chosen location. In 2006, Chinese Wikipedians had a (from what I can see) very successful regional (using the term "regional" for an area with 1.4 billion people is strange, I know) conference. I think it could be worth checking if the conference parameters would still fit for a Italian/Alps/European event.
It is great that we have chosen Taipei, Taiwan ROC as the location for Wikimania 2007 and it would love it to be able to make it there.
Mathias