(Changing subject line, since this is clearly about Oxford, not London!)
We discussed Oxford last year, and the only qualm was accessibility. I'm still reasonably sanguine about this - it's a 1h40 bus ride from London, 1h on the train, regular buses from the London airports, etc etc.
I'm going to contact a few coach companies and see if we can put on our own transport. It would be more convenient, probably cheaper (I'm hoping they'll do it for free or at least heavily discounted, I've known coach companies do sponsorship deals for university events, hopefully they'll do the same for us) and possibly quicker (I'm not sure how direct the public coaches are). An hour and a half on a coach with a bunch of other Wikimedians shouldn't put anyone off coming.
I've just fired off an e-mail to the most enthusiastic person in the OII to see what his thoughts are. I'll wait to hear back from him before contacting Balliol's master though as he's not someone we can really get away with messing around.
I'm also going to send off a "will you sponsor us" e-mail to a contact I have at Torchbox, an Oxfordshire web-design for charities company. They sponsor the Oxford Geek Nights events so I'm optimistic they'll be persuadable to sponsor this.
What are people's thoughts on recruiting additional people to help with the bid? I could easily fire off a few e-mails to student mailing lists I'm on and would probably get some response. Do you have strong "if they don't care enough about wikis to be on this mailing list..." or "too many cooks" thoughts?
Tom
-----Original Message----- From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton Sent: 13 July 2008 18:15 To: andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk; wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Wikimania Oxford 2010
(Changing subject line, since this is clearly about Oxford, not London!)
We discussed Oxford last year, and the only qualm was accessibility. I'm still reasonably sanguine about this - it's a 1h40 bus ride from London, 1h on the train, regular buses from the London airports, etc etc.
I'm going to contact a few coach companies and see if we can put on our own transport. It would be more convenient, probably cheaper (I'm hoping they'll do it for free or at least heavily discounted, I've known coach companies do sponsorship deals for university events, hopefully they'll do the same for us) and possibly quicker (I'm not sure how direct the public coaches are). An hour and a half on a coach with a bunch of other Wikimedians shouldn't put anyone off coming.
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