I have a background in event planning/conference organising/etc, and
contacts in the relevant industries, so can be a resource for that if
asked.
enwiki: [[User:Roux]] • wikiroux(a)gmail.com
2009/9/11 Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>et>:
Casey Brown wrote:
On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 10:18 PM,
ktsquare<ktsquare(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Agree with Casey.
...but that all being sad, Canada has a *very* high probability of
getting it this year, especially with all the work being put into the
Montréal bid already. There's also no harm in starting to plan early,
Seddon from WMUK is already working on a bid for Wikimania 2013!
<http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Wikimania_Bid>
The informal rotation among continents favours a North American site for
2011. (The choice of Gdansk for 2010 breaks any kind of strict
rotation which would have put us in Australia for that year.) A good
bid from elsewhere, particularly Australia, could conceivably put us
there in 2011, but there are some serious practical obstacles to such a
choice.
If then Wikimania is to be in North America there is a strong
predisposition for it to be in Canada. This certainly came up in
several casual conversations that I had in Buenos Aires; it was also
raised in casual conversations that I had in Frankfurt in 2005. It is
now a matter of history that Toronto lost out to Boston for 2006; it
didn't have a chance to win for 2007 since that would have meant two
consecutive years in North America.
A part of the predisposition also relates to the obsessive American
attitude toward Homeland Security. In 2006 the US visa bureaucracy
proved too much for some Wikipedians whom we would have been very
pleased to see in attendance. Some of us may have hoped that relaxation
of these restrictions would have come with the end of the Bush
administration, but comments made by Janet Napolitano do not give much
hope. The impression of Canada in the eyes of residents of other
countries is a more liberal one.
Whatever the predispositions, there can be no Wikimania in Canada
without a functional local group willing to do the work of putting a bid
together, and the even greater work that is involved in bringing the
conference to fruition. That means addressing all aspects of this
task. Although Vancouver has also been mentioned in informal
conversations, (It could draw delegates from the western US.) I don't
see enough local organizational structure here to bring it off That
leaves it up to the Montrealers to see if they can pull this off.
Ec
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