Talk:Wikimania 2010/Bids/Oxford

To-do list

TODO (can anyone do these?):

• Find out where accommodation is available for the time period
• Sort out a list of people that can help organise the conference if we win, with their relevant skills and experience

Anything else?

Venue

Should we go with the Town Hall, as per on the mailing list? I've eliminated most of the other places as unlikely candidates. Majorly ^talk 17:16, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Is it necessary to have more than one venue? The Exam Schools seems to have a suitable hall that can hold the maximum amount of people - used for the opening and closing ceremonies. Majorly ^talk 18:53, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure Exam Schools does have a big enough venue for the opening and closing ceremonies. The largest halls are 450 I think. Though perhaps we could just use both and have video links, but that's far from ideal. --cfp 00:31, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I have heard that the Regal (the former bingo hall down Cowley Road) can host 1000 people or so, and is looking for business; but it might be a bit too far from the city centre. The new Oxford Conference Centre (near the railway station) seems too small, sadly. – Kaihsu 09:56, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Their website is pretty rubbish, so I'm not sure, but it doesn't look like they have the smaller rooms we would need. It looks like just one big room, intended for concerts more than conferences. --Tango 12:19, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Page name

Now that Oxford has been determined as the UK city, shouldn't the bid page(s) be moved to Wikimania 2010/Bids/Oxford? Jon Harald Søby 14:28, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Seems to make sense to me. Adambro 14:34, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Done --cfp 14:41, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

New Oxford business ideas

Thanks for those new ideas User:Warofdreams. I'm going to hold off contacting any of them until after I've spoken to the Oxford trust though as they might be prepared to contact some of them on our behalf. That said I do have contacts at Exient. --cfp 01:25, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

For future reference, here are the other game devs in Oxford: [1] and there's also the middle-ware company NaturalMotion. But like I said I'll wait to see what the Oxford Trust have to say for themselves. --cfp 01:33, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Bid page ideas

Thanks to the Stockholm bid team and the 2008 Atlanta bid for the following suggestions for the bid page:

• Places of worship
• Medical care
• Safety and security - inc. multiculturalism blurb
• Demographics
• Climate
• History
• Dining and catering - I imagine this will be covered by whichever colleges are putting us up, and the Town Hall has caterers for during the day which we may be obliged to use
• Local media - inc. blurb about tomorrow's Oxford Times article on us (ooh it's up already here --cfp 19:31, 28 August 2008 (UTC)).
• Strengths and weaknesses per section

--cfp 18:51, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Some suggestions

Hi, Thanks for the invite. I can't take on any more (unpaid) projects at this time but could offer a few suggestions, based on knowing nothing about wikimania, but having been involved in attending, presenting at & helping to organise a few conferences around elearning, Web 2.0 etc. A few people/organisations you might want to contact for help/speakers etc:

• Brian Kelly UKOLN profile who I believe is still the UK rep to [W3C] & know just about everyone in the UK working on innovative web technologies.
• British Computer Society
• EMERGE The Emerge project is an innovative 28 month consortium-based project. Its primary aim is to support the creation of a sustainable community of practice (CoP) that will develop and exploit new emergent technologies (e.g. social software, pervasive computing) for use in educational settings.
• Someone to talk about copyright/IPR/CC etc eg Charles Oppenheim
• Someone using wikis in education eg UEA
• Someone from the Guardian see Something wiki this way comes

Hope some of these are useful? I will be at Medicine 2.0 in Canada next week & see if anyone comes up with related stuff.Rodw 10:48, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Some good ideas. --cfp 13:22, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

An optimism check?

This is an interesting possibility. I would gently observe that a great deal of effort went into previous UK-based bids. This was despite the fact that imo the outcome of the bidding processes was patently a foregone conclusion before the beginning of the serious work. At least, it was trivial to predict that WM was not coming to Europe, let alone to the UK. This despite the protestations of the 'jury'; comments before, during and after (including the very structure of the voting processes) were quite clear on the matter when one strips out the predictable denials.

So, therefore, before people pour enthusiasm and energy into this all over again, do people actually and seriously, given all they have heard and read now and in the past (and not merely the 'official' party line), think that there is a meaningful chance of winning the bid? If people cannot in the heart of hearts say "yes", I'd suggest this is left to others. If they can genuinely say "yes" without needing to qualify and caveat that answer, then perhaps this will be worth some meaningful effort. Splash 22:16, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I think there is a good chance. If it's done by rotation (which it clearly is, looking at the way this has been going) it'll be either Europe or Australia. We failed in 2007 because the 2005 one was held in Germany, and we didn't even bother properly for the other years. Majorly ^talk 22:26, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Hello from OpenStreetMap

There's a thriving OpenStreetMap community in Oxford (see [2]!) and the OSM conference, State of the Map, is traditionally held in July. OSM is, of course, a wiki, albeit a data rather than a textual one. Might be interesting to see whether the two organisations/conferences could cooperate. --Richard Fairhurst — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.177.179.194 (talk) on 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Xenophobia?

1. The level of xenophobia in England means that non-English visitors are highly likely to encounter abuse, with a possiblity of violence.

This must be some other England? Rich Farmbrough 22:34 31 January 2009 (GMT).

That looks a bit like trolling. :-/ Reverted. Cbrown1023 talk 22:49, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Carbon neutral?

Will the conference and the flights to it be carbon neutral? -- Jeandré, 2009-03-10t13:14z

No. We're a charity dedicated to furthering education, not saving the planet - we can't do everything! Most people will be arranging their own flights, so they can offset them if they like. --Tango 14:09, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

• Given the limited budget that Wikimania has to operate, it is unlikely that any bid will be able to achieve direct carbon neutrality themselves. However it is worth noting that Oxford is currently involved in various projects to make the city carbon neutral by March 2011. These projects are ongoing and by the time of the conference, many will be complete. Offsetting the carbon footprint of attendees would be almost impossible, however we would encourage attendees to look into the carbon footprint of their attendence and do thier best to keep it to a minimum and offset themselves where they can. I hope that helps. Seddon 22:22, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, I wouldn't encourage people to offset - I think most carbon offsetting schemes are a waste of time and money - they don't do what they are intended to do. But that's very off-topic - I suggest this bid simply stay out the whole subject of offsetting (minimising direct emissions is admirable, of course, but not at any significant expense). --Tango 17:14, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Panoramas of Oxford

I've identified a few good panoramas on Flickr. One of Oxford High Street [3] and one of the Radcliffe Camera [4] were available under a free license, and I've uploaded them to Commons. Four others look promising : from the Carfax tower, from the outskirts, from the University Church tower, and one taken in 1987. I'm planning on sending a message along the lines of the one below to the photographers to see if they will permit us to use their images (the 1987 image is already licensed CC 2.0-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works so we could use that even without any new permissions).

I'm e-mailing as an individual working on a bid to hold Wikimania 2010, the conference for users of Wikimedia projects, in Oxford. You can find details of Wikimania at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania, and of the bid at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2010/Bids/Oxford.

I particularly liked your image of [title], [web address] and would like to use this to illustrate the attractive skyline of Oxford for our bid. In order to do so, we would need an e-mail from you confirming that you are happy for us to do so, and ideally releasing it under a free license. Would this be a possibility?

Does anyone have any comments on the usefulness or otherwise of these photos, before I send messages? Warofdreams 01:20, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Match with judging criteria

I've set up Wikimania 2010/Bids/Oxford/Criteria to identify particular strengths, weaknesses and gaps in the match between our proposal and this year's judging criteria. Please help fill it out with details! Warofdreams 11:38, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Logo

Here's another potential background image (CC) [5] --cfp 02:17, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

It's NC apparently. Dag nabit. In any case I think we're probably better off with a cleaner logo. --cfp 02:57, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

You could ask them to relicense, I'm sure they wouldn't mind and the worst thing they can say is no. Cbrown1023 talk 03:00, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

K I have done. For future reference here are User:Seddon's two most recent logos which he'll be uploading in the next few days. [6] [7] They work quite well I think. --cfp 03:15, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

The flickr user kindly changed the license. I've uploaded it to commons here:

--cfp 13:45, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I must say I am quite excited to see that this UK bid seems to be gradually coming together. It would be nice to be able to get to a Wikimania and whilst I'd be prepared to travel outside of the UK, certainly being in the UK would make it easier for me. I shall hopefully be graduating in 2010 and so I have absolutely no idea where I will be so unfortunately can't be sure whether I'll be able to attend. The logos look really nice and good work getting the image re-licensed. Adambro 14:34, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Here's User:Seddon's latest logo, for letters etc. [8] --cfp

Can this be marked as completed now? Current version looks good to me! 155.202.254.82 14:18, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

As I said earlier, we need to get rid of the Ariel font in the dates, and there needs to be a real en-dash (–). – Kaihsu 00:12, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Firearms

Please edit this part:

"Firearms in the UK are illegal to carry in any form when in public"

As it is inaccurate.

Carrying firearms in a public place (section 19 of the 1968 Act) 22.12 Section 19 of the 1968 Act makes it an offence to have in a public place without lawful authority or reasonable excuse (the proof whereof lies on the accused) a loaded air weapon or a loaded shot gun, or any other firearm, whether loaded or not, together with ammunition suitable for use in that firearm. Care should be taken to ensure that those who may have lawful authority or reasonable excuse to carry firearms in a public place are not unnecessarily inconvenienced.

(taken from the Home Office's Firearms Law Guidance to the Police 2002 - emphasis mine)

[9]

Reasonable excuse may be considered, for example, the carriage of a firearm to and from a range, club or shop. Obviously carrying a concealed weapon for personal defence would not be considered acceptable. The latter emphasis demonstrates that the laws intention is not to prohibit those with reasonable excuse from going about their legal business.

This is also inaccurate:

"It is also illegal to carry blades or knives on your person."

A penknife with a non-locking blade of up to 3 inches in length is entirely legal as an 'everyday carry'. Other knives, such as fixed bladed knives or folding bladed knives whose blades lock when open may be carried if the user can show a good reason. Once again the lawful authority or reasonable excuse element is important here. A person, having bought a 6" Sabatier cook's knife, walking back to their car from the shopping centre would not be committing an offence. Neither would a craft knife maker on the way to a country fair to display their wares fall foul of the law.

These may seem petty complaints but a wiki's credibility stands or falls by its accuracy.

I didn't make the edits myself as I'm just passing through and I thought it might be discourteous. ;o>

Are either of these particularly relevant in the page, anyway? I'm not sure I can really see anyone's decision to come to the UK or not being based on our gun laws... Shimgray 23:22, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Though not strictly necessary, I have toned down the sentences a bit, according to my understanding of the law. – Kaihsu 13:40, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Flights

I've just had a play with skyscanner.net (which I'd not heard of before), and it seems to break down for some of the odder destinations - we note here that no data's available for Delhi, for example, but if you ask it for specific dates in August then it spits out a figure (which looks to be around the £500 mark).

Might it be better to pick flight costs for the equivalent weekend (say Thurs 30th-Mon 3rd) in 2009, and use those? Shimgray 23:31, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

...and I've done it, with some caveats. I have a vague recollection that some transatlantic routes may be cheaper into Birmingham than London - anyone remember anything about this? We're certainly well-placed for a connecting train from BHX. Shimgray 00:31, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

That's great, thanks for doing this. I just used it to generate rough figures as quickly as possible, but yours are not only more useful but also in many cases cheaper. Warofdreams 19:22, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Can you prominently add the average cost of transport from the airport to Oxford to that section, so it's clear that this is an additional 20-25 pounds and ~2 hours? -- sj | help translate |+

The cost and time for onward travel depends greatly on the means of transport (2 hours and £20-25 is a possible figure for travel from Luton or Gatwick airports, but Heathrow and Birmingham should be cheaper and quicker), and also how far in advance tickets are booked. I've instead added a note referring people to the travel "Within the UK" section; this already has journey times and we can add some more detailed information on the likely costs. Warofdreams 14:19, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Local team definition

I'd like to know more about what the local team looks like. Can you add into the bid a short section describing the local team, indicating who from your 'local team' page is actively involved, and highlighting specific roles listed on the organization page?

Thanks, -- sj | help translate |+ 00:51, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Or asked it in another way: You have stressed very much in your presentation and in the IRC chat the involvement and commitment of the chapter. Do I understand it right that the chapter would be the official organizer of the conference?--194.126.228.2 08:57, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

That is a different question to sj's. What would be organised by the chapter and what by WMF would need to be decided following discussions with WMF. It is certainly possible that WMUK could be the primary organiser of the conference. --Tango 13:07, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Internet access (wireless)

Hello. I can't seem to find any reference to internet access in the venue. Is there any? Would Wikimania have access to it? Thanks notafish }<';> 11:06, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

My mistake, found it. notafish }<';> 11:07, 15 April 2009 (UTC)