[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2007 - get ready for the third edition.

[Samuel Klein]

Hello Sue,

On Wed, 16 Aug 2006, Sue Reed wrote:

> There is something strange and geeky about me mentioning the World 
> Science Fiction convention on a wikimedia email list, but it fits the 
> situation. They have a really great system of organizing and planning 
> future conferences several years in advance. The convention is coming up 
> for this summer in Los Angeles, the 2007 convention location was chosen 
> by popular vote last year, and the 2008 convention location will be 
> chosen at this year's convention.

Perhaps not so strange after all -- Worldcons have a great and
longstanding model; the best of the ones we looked at last year when 
putting together the Boston bid*.


> One of the greatest benefits of pre-planning conventions this way is the 
> pre-registration that happens. A) It gives you money to start working 
> with right away. B) It allows you to realistically and sensibly 
> negotiate with hotels and other vendors regarding number of people that 
> will be attending, etc.

Yes, a great aspect to that system.  It also allows community members to 
dicsuss the various bid options at interim, more regional events; recruit 
potential staff; &c.

Anyone considering hosting Wikimania should read about the Worldcon 
system, and there's a lot of material online:

http://worldcon.org/bids/


"Two years out" seems to be a good amount of advance notice for starting
a serious bid.  (More is needed for really enormous events that rent 
out entire convention centers).

A good and readable description of what it might be like to go from musing 
about a city bid to rounding up support and distributing promotional 
material.  I particularly like the 14-hr turnaround from "we need 
t-shirts" to selling the first dozen :

http://www.australia2010.org/timeline.html


Cheers,
   SJ


* And the WSFS is pretty close to Wikipedia in spirit if not in membership 
-- for instance, they put together a Long List Committee to produce the 
Long List of Worldcons, which comes with its own talkpage ("Notes on the 
Long List of Worldcons").
http://www.nesfa.org/data/LL/index.html