It could be possible that a Wikimedia chapter is chosen to organize a Wikimania, and they can then decide where to go (within their country). Of course, the local chapter is always involved in organizing it, anyway. So instead of a city bid one would have a responsible chapter bid. This of course means that the global community gives a huge amount of trust to that chapter that they look for a place with sufficient infrastructure, public transit/air connection and whatever is necessary... So, the jury would then only choose the chapter (and thus the country), instead of a city.
What is absolutely not possible is just to say "city X will host Wikimania 20xx. Now all go and organize." So there needs to be some system of bids, I think.
Th.
2011/11/23 James Forrester james@jdforrester.org:
On 23 November 2011 19:31, Jan-Bart de Vreede janbart@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 23 nov. 2011, at 20:17, James Forrester wrote:
On 23 November 2011 19:07, Jan-Bart de Vreede janbart@wikimedia.org wrote:
In the past years I have seen a lot of people spend a lot of time on different bids which never made it (even though they were pretty good). Could this be the year that we change this procedure and try to do things differently? I would love to explore how we can avoid a lot of people wasting their energy...
How about taking a little time to look at these and other imperfects of the current system before jumping right in, and trying to see if we can improve it?
Happy to pause things, but there's limited time (even if we just awarded it today, 19 months isn't a huge amount of time to organise an event which is quite a significant amount of work). Previously there have been calls for the Board to establish a "Committee" of some sort to oversee Wikimanias and try to come to some agreement about how to improve the system - but I worry that if we start discussions about how we're going to decide to decide we'll never get anywhere. :-)
true,
And if I am the only one having these concerns then no worries, but taking a couple of days to share concerns might be a good idea :)
Sure. I'm totally not going to try to rail-road this discussion (or maybe it should be on-wiki?) by announcing a Jury when we're not sure how we'll proceed. :-)
J.
James D. Forrester jdforrester@wikimedia.org | jdforrester@gmail.com [[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]