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

[Samuel Klein]

Hello,

I had the pleasure of spending this past Monday in Tel Aviv, speaking
at the Israeli Wikipedia Academy.  (More about that in a bit -- the
support for Wikipedia and wikis in general among universities there
remains extremely strong.)    We talked about next year's Wikimania
over dinner.

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org> wrote:
>> I'm interested in everyone's views on this, and I'd be particularly
>> interested in hearing from the people who've been involved in past
>> Wikimanias, and also from the Haifa people, to hear if this'd be
>> useful for them for 2011.
>
> I know that the Haifa team is definitely interested in this.  Last I
> heard, they were actively reaching out to previous organizers so that
> they could meet them in Gdansk and get feedback/tips.  (They've also
> been setting up planning information on the existing
> wikimaniateamwiki.)

It is always good to see an org team still flush with the energy of
organizing a bid, trying to reach out and connect with all of the
right groups with knowledge from previous years.

And it's always a bit of a letdown if that energy doesn't find anyone
from outside the team with similar energy, reaching back.  Happily,
there are a lot of past organizers - both people who were on bid teams
and people who were part of other institutions - who have spoken up in
recent days to ask how they can help.

If we start a Wikimania Primer now, while a new team has that
honeymoon energy, we can have a detailed discussion in Gdansk about
how to set up a group to   support future org teams from yeear to
year.  As Casey mentioned earlier, there is a lot of good "how-to"
material on the wikimaniateam wiki which is unnecessarily hidden, and
should simply be converted into that sort of public document.*

SJ

* a problem shared with most private wikis...
--
meta.sj at gmail.com         w:user:sj        identi.ca:sj