All,

This is, first and foremost, a (delayed) invitation to all interested parties to continue to contribute to the discussion on meta at [[m:Wikimania 2008/Judging criteria]] regarding the exact criteria that that the Jury ([[m:Wikimania 2008/Jury]]) will be using in their judgements on which Bid will be selected to host Wikimania 2008. We would like as many people as possible to make suggestions as to what they would want from the conference - after all, a large part of it is for the community. These ideally should be finalised by 30 August, so this is a priority.

Secondly, I would like to clarify and expand in slightly more detail the time-line that the Jury will be using, as I have received some questions as to how the process will work:

Firstly, on Thursday 30 August (3 days' time), any Bids which have been put up on meta as proper attempts will be accepted for the next stage; at this point, no new Bids will be accepted. This means that if you are considering working on a Bid, *start immediately*.

Then, on Sunday 23 September (24 days later), all Bids should be complete. This includes information on venue & accommodation, budget & sponsors, proposed dates, and the local team who will work on it (see [[m:Wikimania 2008/Official requirements for bidding cities]] for some more information) on this. There will be a public IRC meeting (on the Freenode network, probably in #wikimania - details to be announced nearer the time) in which the Jury will discuss things with the Bid teams and raise initial queries than they have.

From this point on until Friday 5 October (12 days later) the Jury

will ask the Bid teams questions they have about their Bids, on meta and also via e-mail. During this period we encourage Bid teams to tweak their submissions in response to concerns and questions, though teams are not meant to need to make significant changes to the content of their Bids at this time.

There will be a private meeting of the Jury on 5 October at which point they will each vote separately on a grid based on the criteria that will be finalised soon, with discussion and options to change votes until a Bid has gathered appropriately-strong support. The result will be announced here by myself or one of my fellow Moderators.

The exact voting mechanism is currently being discussed and will be formally announced some time before the meeting for transparency. Please note that it is not intended to release individual Jury members' voting records, but general feedback on each criterion for each Bid (successful or not) will be provided.

Once the 2008 Bid selection is finished, we will be setting up the 2009 Bid selection procedure, so feedback on how this system worked, and what can be improved, is very welcome. The best place for this is probably the talk page of the Jury page, [[m:Talk:Wikimania 2008/Jury]].

Yours,