Re: Al he was just within 24 hours, though I confess I had already changed the UK bid page to a redirect to Oxford.

But seriously:

1) I haven’t seen any progress on cities other than Oxford in the last few weeks. We established Oxford was (bizarrely) even going to be cheaper than Manchester and we have a pretty high chance of getting the OII on board which would make for a superb bid. And in any case for national sponsors I don’t imagine it matters a great deal what city it’s in.

2) We have a strongly preferred venue (the town hall) and a second alternative and it certainly makes no difference whatsoever to sponsors precisely what our venue is.

3) I’m not sure what you mean by this.

There’s really quite a lot of official information around already what with previous bid pages, our bid page, this mailing list etc etc. I can e-mail anyone off list the standard spiel I’ve been sending to people so far, and for clarifications of things I’ll do my best to be on IRC during my waking hours (despite our infinitely annoying firewall) as I imagine so will Al and anyone else who’s interested.

Anyway starting to produce an information pack sounds like a reasonable idea. I suggest you do it in a subpage of our bid for now. So your help is most certainly appreciated. You do have to be careful to ensure initial approaches are pretty concise though as no one wants to wade through a 20 page PDF.

Thanks,

Tom

From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ian A. Holton
Sent: 01 August 2008 16:13
To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Volunteer(s) needed

Tom,

 it might be a good idea to wait until the preparations have progressed a little more. Currently I see a few minor problems in approaching major sponsors:

* The official UK bid city has not been decided upon yet
* Location in Oxford (venue) and dates have not been set
* Official bid on wiki is underpopulated currently

and a few more I can't remember of the top of my head. The reason I see this as problematic is that when questions are raised, there is little "official" information to rely on. This is why for one we should decide which UK city is going to be the official bid city and then of course also the venue.

Once some of this has been worked on, not only by you but all involved in the discussion and process, I think it would be the right time to approach major sponsors, such as telco companies (BT, Virgin...), UK branches of large Internet multinations (Google, Yahoo! etc) as well as local companies and start-ups (Zopa, web hosters, ...) and obviously any other companies that might potentially be interested in sponsoring such an event.

Now to the most important part: As this is a task that can be done non-locally I would be willing to help along with it, for example creating an "information pack" (introduction, key facts, links and contacts) that can be e-mailed with a cover letter to potential companies and then if requested also mailed. I believe that this task is too large to be just manned by one person and would like to do this, if I am asked to get involved, in a small team and open to suggestions, contacts and so on.

Ian
[[User:Poeloq]]

2008/8/1 Tom Holden <thomas.holden@gmail.com>

At least for the moment it makes sense if Kaihsu and I focus on the Oxford centric jobs (e.g. dealing with the OII/venues/accommodation/local sponsorship) but I really need someone to take the lead on looking for big national corporate sponsors.

I already seem to be spending about half my day on the bid, so it would be good if someone could take this task off my hands. (It's pretty damn crucial that someone does it.) It basically just entails firing off lots of emails explaining what Wikimania is, why we need money, how they might benefit, what we'd like to get them from.

It would also be good if someone could start work on improving our presentation. E.g. knocking up a banner, perhaps making a dedicated sub-page of our bid to show sponsors explaining who we are, what Wikimania is etc., tidying up the main bid page.

A final task for someone else (I'll do this eventually if no one else volunteers) is to start knocking up a Gantt chart working backwards from the bid date. Copying Buenos Aires's chart would be a good start.

Tom

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