Wikimania 2013 bids/Cyberspace

Wikimania 2013 candidate cities:

Final Candidate Cities: Hong Kong | London

Other Candidate Cities: Surakarta | Bristol | Naples

Draft bid.

"Location" details

• Online - accessible from anywhere with internet
• Proposed dates (August...?)
• Contact persons:
  • Chris Watkins (User:Chriswaterguy on Wikipedia and Appropedia

Physical conference venues

There is no single physical location. Participants can be anywhere, and access the conference website, which will have with embedded streaming video, embedded playback of previous videos, and links to video downloads, chatrooms (accessible via the page where the video is playing) and of course links to relevant Wikimania wiki pages.

• Contacts with conference venue (emails, price quotes etc.)

• Technical facilities
  • Existing technical installations

    (on site Audio-visual...)

  • Wireless Network implementation

(existing? to be built? easiness of implementation?)

Conference website

Local meetings and individual attendees alike will rely on a conference website designed for online conferencing.

Potential platforms:

• - WP Symposium - Social Networking for WordPress. Being WordPress, embedding video and streaming should be easy.

Please suggest alternatives worth considering

• Chat platform: Xmpp - relatively easy to use, open source and open protocol. Embed particular rooms into particular pages on the conference platform (should be easy if it's WordPress-based) platform.
  • Alternative: IRC - proven but a bit geeky (not a problem for many Wikipedians, but confusing for some)

Separate streams have their own pages/channels.

Proposed rooms are:

1. Main - keynote talks, and topics of very wide interest
2. Seminar rooms - Seminar1, Seminar2 etc. Topics of general interest
3. Tutorial rooms - Tutorial2, Tutorial2 etc. For technical or esoteric topics.
4. Lounge - for general discussion
5. Press, or perhaps just Public - where there is no such thing as a dumb question

Agenda

• 2 hacking days
• 4 days Wikimania
• 1 or 2 day WikiCamp (unconference)

WikiCamp

A BarCamp style emergent conference, officially scheduled for a date soon after the main conference has ended.

Use the same platform, and to a large degree the same virtual rooms (chat channels and audio/video streams) but organize talks and discussions on a collaborative and ad hoc basis.

Accommodation

Your own bed! (Or wherever you are at the time.)

Party opportunities

• Local events.
• Streaming free music videos as one option for parties to play.

On the day

The conference will involve attendees at local gatherings (with good wifi, tested beforehand) and individuals, around the world.

Presentations will mostly be pre-recorded, streamed at the time, and made available for download at the same

Questions: Moderators (preferably at the same location as the speaker) will receive questions via chat, email and/or SMS, and give them to the presenter. (here will need to be a procedure for:

• how the questions are chosen (the moderator could highlight those that aren't obvious cruft or repetitions, and the presenter could choose... in wiki style, all submitted questions would be publicly visible.)
• how much time is given to each. (Ring a bell, like in debates?)

Challenges

• Video chat (e.g. for panels and unplanned break-out sessions.
• Getting people to do good quality presentations on video. On-the-ground help will make a difference - have a team dedicated to linking presenters with on-the-ground helpers and resources. (The recognition value of the Wikimedia Foundation will help. People at universities might help.) This will take time:
  • planning this months ahead
  • giving soft deadlines for submissions of drafts (audio or crappy video versions of the presentation) will help.
  • a deadline for submission of an acceptable talk (say) a week ahead. (They can still resubmit if they do a better version.) If someone doesn't have their talk in, it's a warning to the organizers (who should have other talks on standby).
• The usual chat platform of IRC is a bit geeky for many of the people we'd like to attract. Arrange an XMPP chatroom instead.

Opportunities

• Much more accessible
  • Far more people will be able to participate, from around the world. People who could never usually afford to participate (or who are unable or unwilling to travel long distances will be able to participate.
  • Every continent bar Antarctica has had a Wikimania by now - but attendance has still not been practical and affordable for most Wikimedians and interested people even on the same continent.
• Much lower carbon impact
• More potential presenters.
• Links and communication will happen between a large group of Wikimedians from around the world.
• Encourage more local interaction - people are likely to gather locally in many locations to join in together.
• Inspiring talks accessible to anyone who wants to learn about a particular topic, both during and after the conference.
• A library of useful videos is created.
  • We can suggest or require that the transcript of each talk is open licensed (this just leaves the challenge of transcribing, which can be done by a combination of voice-to-text conversion and collaboration, Wikisource-style.
  • Journalists, bloggers and others will be able to better report on the conference, have a better understanding via the talks, and write more and better articles and posts about what a wiki is and Why You Need to Contribute.
• Refinement of an online conference infrastructure will have many applications for the wiki community, for future conferences (online or face-to-face) and for daily interactions.

Resources

• Local groups

Finances

We need to do some investigation. What is the financial breakdown of a typical Wikimania conference? Including:

• What do the fees cover?
• Who sponsors the conference?
• How much is spent on travel grants?

Funding sources:

• Wikimedia Foundation?
• Corporate sponsors?
  • Would corporate sponsors be as happy with a cyber-conference? Acknowledge their sponsorship in the site, in the same way as it's usually acknowledged at the physical location and in printed materials. They would probably like ads at the end of the videos, like TED Talks, but ads (convincing us to buy as opposed to acknowledging sponsorship) are unlikely to be popular with the Wikimedia community.
• "Voluntary tickets" - when registering, prompt for a choice of, say, $200 sponsor tickets, $40 regular tickets, $20 concession, your own choice of donation amount, or the $0 "Sorry, I'm not able to contribute" option.

Savings:

• All those airfares!

Expenses:

• Setting up a website. Being open source, and with an enthusiastic base of contributors, this should be fairly minimal. A better estimate will be possible after a "dress rehearsal" (see below).

Dress rehearsals

• Wikimania 2011 - we won't have a chance to prepare much, but we can help make a step up from the online experiences of past Wikimanias?
• Wikimania 2012 - perhaps we could gain some funding to prepare a beta version of the conference portal.