What the purpose of this discussion? The program committee already scheduled a session about the future of the WMCON. And as we are a week before, and I believe it's too late to cancel flights and hotels booking, nothing will probably going to be changed, even if there will be consensus about the purpose of the conference.
And while it seem like the discussion is about WMUK's attendees only - I must say I don't think this is the case. They are maybe the biggest delegations (we may starts to change the term this year from "representatives" to "delegation", which fit the case better), but not the only ones. There are other chapters who sends more than the others.
The silence and the ignorance of the organizer team regarding their decision on that is something which worries me more, I think.
On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 7:59 PM, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.comwrote:
Great! We are starting to have the conversation we need to have!
So: What is the purpose of the Wikimedia Conference?
This has never been clearly defined, in my view.
I certainly found attending last year useful as it was a chance to get to know face-to-face people I only knew over email, to share some useful experience of Wikimedia UK's with other chapters, and to get an insight into how others were thinking, and have some meetings which needed to be done face-to-face.
In general those are very useful things. But is that what the conference is for?
Chris On 2 Apr 2014 17:17, "Cristian Consonni" kikkocristian@gmail.com wrote:
(my 2cents here, not speaking in any capacity besides my personal free will)
2014-04-02 14:32 GMT+02:00 Jens Best jens.best@wikimedia.de:
Have a nice time in Berlin, maybe I will drop by on some of the evening events at least. :)
May I say? Please come by also at the conference. I understand the point of having a rule (which we can decide if it is a strict rule or whatever) of 2+1 representatives because it helps to limit costs and it also assures that there isn't over-representation of an entities over some others (which are both good arguments, btw) but thinking of having a closed event were you can not come along if you are interested to do so and you happen to live nearby seems Deeply Wrong(TM) to me. For comparison all General Assemblies of Wikimedia Italia are public, everyone can come along and speak, of course when it comes to voting (e.g. board elections) only members have the right to vote. We always have some bystanders (this includes the occasional "I am painter, why I don't have my Wikipedia page?") and, to date, our assemblies have never being flooded by strangers :-). Moreover, for the sake of "bias" and over-representation I think that this will not be of much more impact than the fact of chosing to hold the event itself in Berlin.
Cristian
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