2008/12/2 Michael Bimmler mbimmler@gmail.com:
2008/12/1 Marco Chiesa chiesa.marco@gmail.com:
For an AGM, I believe the priority should go to having as many people as possible, particularly this being the first one.
Hear, hear. (sorry, this was just to prove to Thomas that I do manage, when I'm sitting in front of a real computer)
Yeah, yeah...
The first annual assembly was then held in Lucerne, which is literally the centre of Switzerland (or rather, the town closest is).
And has a travel museum which I visited pretty much every day it rained during my childhood holidays in Switzerland.
Conclusion/Suggestion: Try to find a transport hub (there I know too less about UK public transport to make a specific suggestion), which needn't necessarily be London, just a place where most people can get to by train / bus in the least amount of time and with the best connections.
Agreed. London, Birmingham or Manchester are all pretty accessible. Oxford may require people to change trains an extra time, although it does have the benefit of allowing us to combine it with Wikimania bid work which at least partially compensates.
Try then to find for the second AGM (I know, this is far away...) again a central place, but somewhere else than the first time (well, okay, 2010 is special, if you do have a Wikimania in Oxford you might strongly consider just holding the AGM during Wikimania at Oxford)
The AGMs need to be pretty close to annual (hence the name!) so the 2010 AGM will be around January time, Wikimania will be in the summer, I don't think it is possible to combine them. I quite like having them around 6 months apart - it means if we go ahead with my idea of turning the AGMs into a one-day conference (with the AGM as just one event during the day) we would have evenly spaced conferences throughout the year - a UK conference in the winter and an international one (Wikimania) in the summer.
and after the third year, you can really get started with "regionalising", i.e. having AGMs somewhere not technically central in order to attract members from regions where you don't have a strong membership base yet (Edinburgh, Cardiff, why not Belfast...). You might want to stop somewhere, though, before you hold AGMs on the Channel Islands ;-)
I agree, that would be good. If we do the conference idea we can try and get sponsorship to enable us to subsidise travel (and maybe accommodation) for those travelling from further afield. We could even subsidise it out of the main charity funds if we can afford it (subsidising travel to the AGM would be questionable [legal, maybe, but it wouldn't look good when we made a pie chart of how much money has been spend on admin vs projects in the annual report], but subsidising travel to a conference would be fine).