Yes, finally the discussion we need! Pity that it happens only one week before the conference itself.
My point of view: We have different types of conference: GLAMCamp, EduWiki, Wikimania, whatever.
Beside Wikimania, which is quite a "fruit salad" of topics and themes and seen as *the* gathering of the global Wikimedia community, all of thoses confereces have quite a special, limited scope. I see the Wikimedia Conference as the highly political, meta level conference. This is the only meeting in the year where we can discuss governance, strategy, movement politics issues only, excluding all the programmatic work. As it is the only meeting of this type during the year, at least a part of the programme team tried to keep all the sessions in this meta scope. We felt a need for those topics, which can't be discussed at those other meetings.
Obviously, it doesn't seem to be so clear for many people. Maybe the majority even thinks that we don't even need that type of conference. Who knows.., all discussion adressing this issue fizzled out in the last three past.
However, please think about this! It's important. At the conference we'll have a special session about this, the session is called actually "Future of the Wikimedia Conference". We need input from everyone to see how we should continue and what should happen next year.
Best Cornelius
---- Cornelius Kibelka
Twitter: @jaancornelius Mobile:+351-91-9860232 (Vodafone PT) German number currently offline
On 2 April 2014 19:16, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com wrote:
I am genuinely puzzled as to why, if nobody on the WMUK board (such as the CEO or the current Chairman) is sure what the purpose of the conference is, they should chose to invest the donor's money in sending 5 trustees and 3 full time employees to it (presumably the employees are being paid for their time rather than going as volunteers).
Just to be clear, I know what the benefits we will get out of it are, and I can tell you the direction that I would like the conference to take in future; I'm just wondering whether others have the same perception.
This is not a new question, as Nathan has pointed out, and he is probably right to say it is best to continue it here; https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Future_of_the_Wikimedia_Conference
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