[Wikimediaau-l] Melbourne Wikimania 2010

[Nick Jenkins]

Okay, so it sounds like we're maybe converging on a few wiki-related events/happenings in the space of 7 or 8 days in January 2009:

* AusWikiCamp2009:
 - Somewhere reasonably central in a state capital city, but not Hobart, on the weekend of 17-18 January 2009.
 - Organised along BarCamp lines, with talks coming from and organised by attendees. If you want to rant about something, rave about
something, tell us about a cool WikiProject, and so forth, well, here's your chance!
 - There'd probably be non-talk things we'd want to do too, including:
 - For morning tea, wear party hats & eat a birthday cake with icing that reads "Happy 8th Birthday Wikipedia!!" + associated photo
op.
 - A session to work on improving the bid for Wikimania 2010.
 - Deciding on/Giving out Editors Challenge awards?
 - A group dinner on the Saturday night.
 - maybe finish around 4 PM-ish on Sunday to give people heading off interstate time to get to airport & arrive in time for dinner,
and to give people who live locally time to spend Sunday evening with family?


* A Wikimedia Australia stand at the Open Day for Linux.Conf.Au on Saturday 24th Jan 2009:
 - Sounds like there's going to be enough Wikimedians there (e.g. Brianna/Angela/Chuq/me/hopefully other folks too) to populate a
booth, plus to give enough slack for these people each in turn to wander around and check out the other booths (which is good,
because one of the complaints you always hear at open day is from people who are running a booth by themselves, who all day can see
from a distance all the other cool stuff that's happening, but don't never get the chance to actually go up and see it and interact
with the people at the other stands).
 - A caveat/warning: Need to have something visually interesting to grab people's attention & engage them. You're going to be in
room filled with people demo-ing homemade robots, people jumping around on homemade dance mats, homemade segways, etc. Want
something that's flashy, engaging, fun, cool, interactive, kind of unusual, that they probably won't have seen before, that makes
people stop, piques their interest, and that makes them go "What's that? What's going on here? Tell me more!"
 - If possible, if people who have Wikimedia/Wikipedia related clothing could wear it on this day, then that could be a nice touch.
But if people would rather not, that's fine too :-)
 - Could let people sign up for/join Wikimedia Australia.
 - Perhaps hand out freebie badges / stickers for Wikipedia / Wikimedia (if we have any!)


* There's also the potential "Free as in Freedom" mini-conf at Linux.Conf.Au


Sounding okay so far? Any objections/alterations/thoughts/comments/likes/dislikes/feedback/etc?

-- All the best,
Nick.