Re: [Wikimedia-Canada] Wikimania Montreal 2011?

Casey Brown wrote: 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