On 9/25/06, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com wrote:
Other events (please ignore differences in size by orders of magnitude) such as the Olympic Games do have a candidate city evaluation as well. If one city is chosen, the effort put into 20 other proposals is void.
Sorry, it is very hard to ignore the differences between Wikimania and events like the Olympic Games.
And there is another issue: How to we keep people working for Wikimania even if "their city" is not chosen this time. It is not wasting the goodwill of companies (especially multinational corporations) to ask if their offer for sponsorship still applies to the chosen location.
Right, but the bidding teams were encouraged to look for *local* sponsors. Perhaps it would be better to explicitly forbid the teams to do that before the city is chosen: The Wikimedia Foundation can look for global sponsors long before the selection, and ask local sponsors afterwards, together with the bidding team. Just an idea to lessen the amount of work and minimize the possible disappointments.
Arne