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

[Finne Boonen]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 12:44, Lodewijk <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org> wrote:
>> 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).

Maybe the problem is that every conference tries to do better/bigger
then the previous ones? Which can quickly lead to 'too
big/complicated'

>> 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

However, most other fields have several conferences a year where
people meet each other. I'm not sure we have enough events that allow
real international 'mingling' to take place. In my experience most
conferences we have are very local events, and there is real benefit
from interacting in person with a wider community then the local one.

Finne