Dear all,
Summary: Please share which topics you would like to discuss at Wikimania!
(feel free to forward this email to relevant mailing lists) At Wikimania, I would like to try to increase the number planned and facilitated discussions directly relating to the wikimedia projects (rather than meta-discussions). For that we have (Thanks Ed!) set up the 'Discussion Room' as an experiment.
For a full day, we will dedicate one room to current, relevant and facilitated round table discussions. However, to make sure we have current and relevant topics, I need your help! These discussions will be round table discussions, involving everyone in the room (ideally), so no panel discussions where you can lean back and let a happy few do all the heavy lifting. Therefore, it is important that you care about the topics!
*What topics*, directly relating to the Wikimedia projects, *would you like to discuss at Wikimania*? Would you like to talk about 'Original Research on Wikipedia'? Or maybe you would like to discussion about the perceived hostility of the Wikimedia Commons community? Perhaps the way notability is handled in different languages is more to your taste? Or mentoring programs?
If you're interested, please do two things: 1) sign up as interested on the session page https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Discussion_Room (updates will be posted there too) 2) tell us the topics that would make you participate the discussion!
Finally, I am also looking for a little help in the organization - I need one or two people to help with facilitation (if you know someone good, just email me offlist), and it would be awesome if we could have one or two people each session who can help with taking notes effectively - so that we can summarize some discussion outcomes.
Thanks for your help!
Best,
Lodewijk / effeietsanders