On 8/17/06, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
On the subject of size. I am personally not in favour of an *international Wikimedia conference* (keywords international and Wikimedia) that will hold more than 500 people, ever. The reason for this were clear last year, but even clearer this year, ie. opening the conference to 1000 people makes it, in my opinion, lose the "Wikimedia" touch, by bringing many people in who have in the end nothing to do with Wikimedia. Mind you, I find the interaction with other organisations and people with different web, collaborative, knowledge experiences very fruitful and interesting, but this year showed a trend that I wish we did not facilitate too much. There were many many local (as in US) people who had but a far fetched interest in our projects, and thus did not pertain to the "Wikimedia Community" or had no intention of ever pertaining to it.
And yet all those US people whose involvement in en.wikipedia.org is significant and who should be allowed to come to a conference, if they are interested.
The foundation has competing interests with the conference: one predominantly huge-sized project, and the whole of everything including the much smaller ones and the global picture.
If the interests of the two collide to some degree, there are solutions: split the conference into World and US conferences, dual-track the conference, etc.
Rather than artificially constraining the size of Wikimania, structural solutions and a review of the goals of the conference and foundation are in order.