[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2008 and reflecting on what Wikimania is all about

[George Herbert]

On 8/17/06, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the subject of size. I am personally not in favour of an
> *international Wikimedia conference* (keywords international and
> Wikimedia) that will hold more than 500 people, ever. The reason for
> this were clear last year, but even clearer this year, ie. opening the
> conference to 1000 people makes it, in my opinion, lose the
> "Wikimedia" touch, by bringing many people in who have in the end
> nothing to do with Wikimedia. Mind you, I find the interaction with
> other organisations and people with different web, collaborative,
> knowledge experiences very fruitful and interesting, but this year
> showed a trend that I wish we did not facilitate too much. There were
> many many local (as in US) people who had but a far fetched interest
> in our projects, and thus did not pertain to the "Wikimedia Community"
> or had no intention of ever pertaining to it.

And yet all those US people whose involvement in en.wikipedia.org is
significant and who should be allowed to come to a conference, if they
are interested.

The foundation has competing interests with the conference: one
predominantly huge-sized project, and the whole of everything
including the much smaller ones and the global picture.

If the interests of the two collide to some degree, there are
solutions: split the conference into World and US conferences,
dual-track the conference, etc.

Rather than artificially constraining the size of Wikimania,
structural solutions and a review of the goals of the conference and
foundation are in order.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com