[Wikimania-l] What to do about 2012, and the future

[Harel Cain]

(moved from wikimania-jury and wikimania-planning lists to here at the
advice of Lodewijk)

Hi all,

My comments below express my personal opinion only, which is not necessarily
representative of the opinion of WM Israel or of the WM Haifa local team.

As someone who attended Wikimania 2007, 2010 and is now spending countless
hours together with other team members on preparing WM 2011, I wanted to
raise a somewhat controversial idea, namely that in future years, Wikimania
will be held once every two years (biannually) and not annually.

The reason I'm saying this is not only the huge effort that has to be
invested by the local team year after year, but what is potentially a lack
of strong bids to host Wikimania 2012, as witnessed by this year's jury.
Even if strong bids emerge for 2012 eventually, I'm sure that in years to
come the problem will repeat and again we might face a situation where there
are no strong bids at all.

To me, the lack of strong bids is an indicator that holding a big, expensive
and complex international conference in a changing location year after year
is not very realistic in the long term - and Wikimania is just becoming ever
more big, expensive and complex (for example, WM2011 will see at least three
side events preceding/co-locating with it).

Few international organizations do that. In fact, many international
conferences such as the International Congress of Mathematicians are held
every 4 years! I don't think it will be a bad sign for the Wikimedia
movement / foundation to decide to hold Wikimania every two years, just a
realistic understanding on its part that the tradition of annual Wikimanias
is not very practical. I hope that eventually, someone will have the
decision power and the courage to take this decision - if not for 2012 (I'm
not advocating to skip WM2012 specifically, that's not my agenda), then in
the future.


Your thoughts?


Yours,

Harel Cain
Wikimania 2011 local team (but speaking personally)
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