On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
But all of the above are nice dreams about the future. Is there any proven experience from the past that demonstrates why personal meetings between Wikimedians are not just fun for them, but actually beneficial to the Wikimedia community, the Internet, the Humanity?
Well, the board has real life meetings and, like David, most of the chapters do. :-)
There's also been "WMCON" where a bunch of board members, developers, and chapter members had meetings in the same place at the same time, which seems to have been very beneficial, because they've had two-in-a-row. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMCON
There was also a fundraising summit hosted by Wikimedia UK http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Fundraising_Summit, which Thomas could tell us more about.
Can anyone here give me solid examples of successful projects that were born thanks to past Wikimanias?
Something obvious is hacking days, which hopefully Brion could tell us more about. :-) Pages about previous hacking days:
* http://wikimania2005.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacking_Days&oldid=7240 * http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_days * http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_days * http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Days