Dear all, ( translators, please forward to your local projects )

Wikimania 2005 is coming up, during the first week of August. It is being held in Frankfurt, in a beautiful hostel-and-conference-center downtown. If you are planning on coming, register this week, before the conference and hostel rates go up!

http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/registration/ http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/registration/hackingdays.php

Send email to wikimania-registration@wikimedia.org if you have any diffulcties. See who else is already registered: http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/registration/attendees.php

We have some excellent speakers coming, including Jimmy Wales himself, Ward Cunningham, Richard Stallman, Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, and Ross Mayfield of Socialtext; also Gabriele Beger on law, Achal Prabhala on rural information development in Southern Africa, and Stefan Magdalinski on building magical wiki applets.

http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Speakers

There will also be presentations by core developers of many wiki platforms, including Twiki, Xwiki, and Socialtext; by Wikipedians, about their projects; and by academics researching Wikipedia.

The whole conference has been made as inexpensive as possible, so that all can attend. The last three days will be a larger conference, when we take over the entire hostel; it should be a great deal of fun. Registration for all three days is 50 Euros. The first half of the week will be devoted to our Hacking Days, a small-group discussion and brainstorming among developers; these days are free (but you must register for them as well, to reserve space in the hostel).

SJ

ps -- If you are interested in helping out with the event, even if you can't be there yourself, we could use help setting up our Trivia Contest and judging the initial entries for the summer writing & media competition. More about these later. http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Competitions

pps -- If you really want to come, but can't quite afford it; please register and fill out the field at the end of the form to request a discount.

ppps -- If you can't come, but still want to participate, there will be audio streaming, IRC backchannels, and regular podcasts available of conference events. You can sign up or ask for details on the remote-particpation page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Remote_participation