On 8/17/06, Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com