On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 7:59 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2010/6/21 Juliana da Costa José juliana@wikimania2010.pl:
My oppinion as an actual working member of this year Wikimania, would be to discuss this after the venue. If everything is finished, the leading team will write a report about the things which happened positivly and negativly. I think on this base it would be more revealing to discuss alterations in familiar Wikimania structure of planning.
Every year there has been a plan to write a report afterwards on what went well, what didn't, etc.. Has such a report ever actually been written? I've never seen one (sometimes we get the results of a survey of attendees with some minimal analysis, but that's about it). It would be really good if we could get such a report, especially this year since there definitely have been things that have gone wrong. (I know it is very tempting, and understandable, to collapse in exhaustion once the event is finished and never get around to writing the report - I've done exactly the same thing before - so I'm not blaming anyone, just emphasising how useful such a report would be.)
There have been post-mortems every year (with varying degrees of formality and levels of participation); these have resulted in a handful of private reports to the Foundation & within the org team (and many more sets of informal notes). Basically, every year the organizers have sat down, sometimes with other people and sometimes not, and talked about the conference afterwards; ideally this gets written up. I personally have four sets of these notes tucked away in various notebooks, documents, etc....
What there has never been is a publicly available report, or summation of these meetings, that anyone ever got around to posting for the rest of the world to see -- I think that's the part where exhaustion comes into play :) It's hard to overstate how sick of Wikimania one is after organizing the conference! And after a month or two when everyone's recovered, you're usually on to picking up the rest of your life and there hasn't been any outside impetus to revisit the report to make it publicly available. That might be another area where gentle prodding from a wikimania committee could help. Otherwise it's just always a low priority.
As for Juliana's note, it would be great to have a report from 2010, for sure; my ideas about a Wikimania committee are actually not based on the experiences of any particular year, however, but rather needs that I've seen reoccur from year to year. There are certain patterns that we can identify and probably make easier for future organizers, rather than banging our heads against the same wall every time. Any structure should take into account the experiences of all the years, which have all been different but all had similarities too, and our hopes for the future besides.
-- phoebe
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