[Foundation-l] Floating a notion: permanent Wikimania committee?

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> For several years now, people have occasionally floated the notion
> that there should be a permanent Wikimania oversight committee –
> basically, a group of people responsible for giving some coaching and
> guidance and oversight to the local planning team each year.  Over the
> years, support has been offered each year by people like Phoebe, James
> Forrester, Delphine (Delphine both in her staff role and as a
> volunteer) and SJ … but there has never (AFAIK) been a formal
> oversight committee.  I think there probably should be.

Hello Sue and all,

Good timing -- we just had a long conversation about this in the
#wikimedia open meeting this afternoon. There were quite a few
participants, including several past wikimania organizers.

Quick summary of that discussion:
* there is definite interest in an ongoing Wikimania (oversight,
governance, guidance) (body, committee, group) (we talked for quite a
while about those various names and their different connotations)

* there are a few potential roles that people see for such a group:
** 1) collecting and writing better documentation about the
conference, including best practices for organization and what has
happened in the past
** 2) answering questions from Wikimania organizers about past
practices, helping coordinate who to ask about various aspects
** 3) providing oversight to the overall wikimania process -- for
instance making sure that a bid jury is called and the bids are
submitted in time (like elections)
** 4) providing oversight/governance as the conference progresses --
for instance, getting regular reports about the conference. Along with
this, the org team would have someone to report to if, say, a venue
burns down or some other catastrophe happens.

These ideas are roughly in order of how much controversy they
generated among discussion participants. I think we all pretty much
agreed that we need better conference documentation, and a loose
community group of past organizers and interested participants can
provide such documentation. Here's a start:

Conference handbook: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/Handbook
-- let's write the big book of Wikimania
Conference checklist:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/checklist -- make sure you
have everything you need
Conference community:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/community -- a start at a
community group, w/ interested participants.

We discussed however that for any oversight/governance functions we
might need a more formalized structure and perhaps a formal mandate.
This seemed like a Board-level issue to several people (including me).
We also discussed that there's not a good process for proposing and
forming community committees that would interact with the Foundation
on various issues.

What do you all think?

best,
Phoebe