On 8/17/06, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
I'm personally of the opinion that Wikimania should remain very much a community event, and in fact bring it back to something closer to a retreat than anything else.
One of the biggest questions -- problems? opportunities? -- planning the program this year was that the question of "what Wikimania is" was and is largely unanswered (we came up with a working definition, which is reflected in the CfP; perhaps another definition was carried in by participants in Wikimania '05). One of my biggest regrets with the program this year was that there were not more community (Wikimedia)-centered presentations and events; in fact, not that many (comparatively) were submitted -- despite the advertising on the projects that we did do -- and we had to push for more. This is only one part of the community atmosphere at the conference, of course -- the lack of community space at the physical venue is an unrelated question that none of us anticipated well enough.
But don't forget that this is an inclusive and fluid community, and what counts as part of that 'community' is subject to interpretation. Is research about wikis relevant? Is a presentation by lawyers on laws that absolutely affect the continued operations of the projects? Is talking about free culture, generically, at a gathering of people who are intimately involved in the biggest free culture project in the world relevant? What about education? Reference publishing? It seems to me that to restrict the conference to a very literal set of topics revolving around Wikimedia/pedia would in turn lessen the value of the conference, and lessen the potential chance for new and great ideas to come out of it that would benefit the projects. Let's not be insular, as a community. Not everyone who has good and relevant ideas has worked their way through editing, mailing lists, Foundation business, etc. and become a Wikip/media "community member" according to some entirely vague set of criteria which seem to come down to "I recognize their username." Honestly, folks, I think it's fair to say that none of you knew who I was before I came to Wikimania the first time; I certainly wasn't a "person who counted" in the Foundation or even Wikipedia.... and for better or worse, without attending Wikimania '05 I certainly wouldn't have been as heavily involved in Wikimania '06 as I was.
If Wikimania is determined to be *simply* a social gathering -- or simply a policy-making and direction-setting gathering for the projects and the Foundation -- then that is another question, and if so, next year let's not waste time and energy inviting the Larry Lessigs of the world, since they are surely not community members in that sense (unless he actually edits, of course).
On a practical level: I agree that restricting day admissions, or having just one day that's open to day registration, is a good idea, and I agree with Austin about aiming towards a "retreat" feel. Probably having more topical preconferences besides just hacking days is also a good idea. There's been talk about something similar for social science research/wiki research; having a full day just to talk about Foundation issues in an open but not-entirely-public forum would also be useful. Finally, of course there must be more international visitors; this is a goal that no one who helped organize disagrees with, and we all would have liked to have done better. For those of you playing along at home, we did hand out a few dozen scholarships to people from all over the world -- fairly remarkable for a non-profit organization and a non-profit conference that just started real planning 9 months in advance. And I think the final count on the countries that attendees were from was just under 100? Whatever it was, next year and the years after should strive to be even more internationally diverse, whether that means linguistically, culturally, geographically, or otherwise. (Although, having the conference in a particular area does mean -- and should mean -- that more people from that area show up in that particular year; otherwise, why move the conference at all? We'll just have it in St. Pete's every year...)
What else? What *is* Wikimania? As Delphine says, 2006 was only the second conference, and there's no reason the tone of the event can't change radically for next year.
best, phoebe/brassratgirl