Wikimania 2008/Guidelines

Trying to learn on mistakes made in the previous years, here are few ideas about what guidelines (see Wikimania/Judging criteria) we need to respect to make the bid for Wikimania 2008 a successful one.

The jury

• The jury must be composed of a very international and diversified crew. The balance between different continents should be respected and the balance between different skills should also be respected. (One person more oriented press and PR, one more oriented financial, one more oriented community, one person who went to all the other Wikimanias etc.)
• The jury must come up IN ADVANCE with a grid of evaluation that will be presented to the bidders and so that they know on which criteria they are being judged. A point system needs to be worked out as to how many points will be attributed to this or that item in the grid, and each member of the jury will award the points they want for each item. The average should be calculated for each item, and the total should be made transparent for each item when the choice is made.

Building your bid

• Bidders should work on meta from the beginning, or at least retrace the steps that they made to get where they are when they propose the bid. We are, after all, a collaborative community, and being able to hit the history button and see what work has gotten into the deal is very important. I also understand that there are things you can't "say" before they are acquired, but something like "contact with the competent authorities has been established on 3rd January 2006" is enough to start with. In short, a history of the bid should always be provided with the final bid.

• A bid should be finished when it comes onto the table, and even between the first and second round, the questions the jury asks should only be questions of clarification, not trying to fill the gaps by comparing one and the other bids.
• Major sponsors must write a letter of intent that the jury should be able to review. On the other hand, the jury should pledge that they will send a letter to the major sponsors if the city is not chosen, to thank them for their support.
• A prospective budget should be handed in by every bidding team along the lines of a template budget that the jury should put together and handed in to the bidders in advance.

Evaluation of past Wikimanias

• An evaluation of the past Wikimania should be provided by the Foundation so as to help the bidders to address the mistakes made in past editions. What went right, what went wrong? What should we keep, what should we change? This can maybe be triggered by an attendees survey at the end of Wikimania that would then be put into a report of the conference at the disposal of the general public.