[Foundation-l] [Wikimania-l] Wikimania 2008 will happen in Alexandria, Egypt

Sat Oct 13 04:13:43 UTC 2007

Moving back on to topic, I'd like to question the composition of the
jury in this case. Who chose the jury members, and how?

Further, how can we improve the jury selection process so that the
jury members take more of an actual interest in the bidding process?
For background, only four members of the jury actually participated in
the bidders' IRC meeting or Q&A page on meta for Alexandria:

* Britty/Kizu Naoko/User:Aphaia
* brassratgirl/Phoebe Ayers
* Theodoranian/Titan Deng
* Jan-Bart De Vreede/User:Jan-Bart

Additionally, one of those jury members basically accused the Atlanta
team of shit-stirring when the GLBT issue was raised on the Q&A page
for Alexandria. The other Q&A pages show similar lack of interest on
the part of most jury members to actually find out more about the
candidate bids. The fact that the Q&A pages were set up for the *jury*
to ask questions of the bid teams was effectively ignored, because the
jury wasn't making the effort to ask the questions some Wikimedians
thought were relevant and should be asked. Does this mean the jury was
crap, or the process was crap?

Additionally, why were there "advisors", who selected them, and what
role did they serve in the judging process?

Hopefully we can steer this thread back on topic and address some of
the things that should be improved for the Wikimania 2009 bidding
process.

~Mark Ryan