this is dumb

Explicit support

The following groups are actively interested in helping out.

• The Berkman Center has been generous with offers of space and time. We have the use of any rooms we need, and in the past two weeks have already had significant support from the Center's managing director (Colin Maclay) and staff. Contact: Colin Maclay, Erica George
• MIT Media Lab - many fans there.

  electronic publishing in particular is keen on supporting a conference 'in any way they can'; WP, a unified translation dictionary, and other projects are diretly tied into their work this year and in the foreseeable future. Contact: Mako Hill

  $100 laptop project hopes to work more closely with WP, for integration of content and possible development of richer interface layers. Contact: Alan Kay

  General Media Lab support could help out with hacking days, for instance; a much larger body of wiki hackers can be found around campus there.

• Free Biology @ HMS and around Boston - interested in directly supporting MediaWiki development. Some grad-student support through a professor at HMS, if needed. Contact: Sasha Wait

Librarianship

• Librarian networks - the local SLA chapter would like to be involved; they don't have much cash but can help volunteer; have long experience with dealing with local hotels and visiting guests, otherwise looking after speakers; producing signs and handouts to orient people; &c. Contact: jkb'

  Ref librarians (including one of the country's finest digital librarians) offered to handle information desk(s) on site, wiki updating, etc. Contact: Jessamyn

  Would also love to help us develop better connections within the library community, select great speakers, &c.

• Harvard Libraries - the Law Library director wants to know what they can do to help. We can probably arrange whatever we want with libraries on campus; there are both fantastic resourecs here and broad support from them. We could reserve a few 15-person rooms for a focused day-long wikifest in a library.

Large organizations

• The W3C. Love the conference idea; seriously considering sponsorship.
• IBM research labs. Definitely want to help out somehow; planning another big Wikipedia research project over the coming year. Considering sponsorship. Contact: Martin W
• O'Reilly - book support for a writing contest. (might make good party sponsors; haven't been asked)
• Museum of Science - collaboration on educational projects; want to talk more about sponsoring an event in the museum.

Active interest

People and organizations which are interested in Wikimania and would like to be involved; or have offered non-specific support and could be asked for something specific.

• International groups : the Woodbridge Society (around Harvard). Large, close-knit alum community around the world; interested in helping spread the word.
• The Kennedy School of Government [KSG]. Two grads there are interested in helping attract the right speakers, sponsor guests from Latin America, and draw professors working on e-government and ICTs.

  We could use their excellent ARCO Forum for a suitable satellite talk/event.

  Specific support available from the Belfer Center's Digital Governance initiative, part of the National Center for Digital Government. Contact: Center director Jane Fountain

  Travel support available from the David Rockefeller Institute for Latin American Studies; particularly from Chile, where they have a branch. A proper pitch remains to be made; it was suggested they could bring over "maybe 4 people" from Latin America for Wikimania. contact: Federico Baradello

  One of the best technical institutes in Latin America, Mexico's ITAM, has recently become a sister school of sorts to the KSG. They have extensive funds for student exchange and other collaboration; could likely send a couple of technologists or presenters to Boston for a few weeks overlapping with Wikimania. contact: Federico Baradello

• Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing (pdf), a long-term project started this spring that expects to scale up to 100 people in its own building in 5 years. Has funds to support relevant research & collaboration; could cover bringing relevant speakers/devs to a conf/hackfest. A good way to involve the entire university, if some kind of coordination with subject experts is useful for a test project.

"IIC is looking to fund projects that:
- involve groups of researchers at Harvard
- require extraordinary computing-related capabilities
- require close collaborations between traditional scientists and computer scientists
- address an unsolved need that applies to more than one discipline
- is of interest to computer science"

They move slowly, however, and haven't gotten to discuss Wikimania & related projects yet.

• CMS @ MIT - "comparative media studies" and the Education Arcade. Discussions of games and massively multiplayer environments (1000-person collaborative games), applied to knowledge creation; want to develop better environments/interfaces for collaboration.

• Cambridge city government. Support from three councilmen; but they are currently worried about the pending election. After that, once it is known who the Mayor is, it will be easy to get support, notice via official city channels, etc. Ditto from our state rep, Marty Walz. This kind of support is very helpful for getting in touch with first-generation communities that still have broad connections with their native countries.
• Boston Public Libraries. We could arrange tours or satellite events with them; they often have speaking events in their central building, which are naturally publicized through the city calendars and community-education channels.

• Wolfram Research. Good ongoing correspondence with both Eric Weisstein and Stephen Wolfram re: how to make both MathWorld/PhysicsWorld and WP better. Very interested in Wikipedia and its development.

Media

• The Globe. They've run a number of pieces on Wikipedia and Wikinews, and are planning another series on Wikipedia from a contributor's perspective. Were definitely interested in covering Wikimania; asked for details last year but didn't run a piece. Local interest would make it a much bigger deal.
• The New York Times. Have reporters who would expressly be interested in covering the conference; even outside of tech-writers (jenny 8, et al).
• CCTV -- a well-supported community TV studio. They would be glad to film satellite events not covered by on-campus media; hard to be definite without a better sense of what such events would be like. There are local TV stations where we could get airtime for such video, and a community studio for people to collaborate directly on editing footage for the same purpose.

  There is also the educational-cable system in Boston; I don't know how their audience size compares. The City of Cambridge can provide access to those stations for TV broadcasts (the question would be, how long to broadcast what)

• MIT's Technology Review (circulation: 300k+). They love WP, invited Jimbo to speak at their last conference, and have a receptive audience for Wikimedia's goals (all MIT alums + 100k others). Three of the conference organizers (who were also the managing editors & publishers of the magazine) took time to praise Wikipedia.
• Christopher Lydon's Open Source program. Lydon and Ben Walker, who maintains the blog and records much of the shows, are huge fans, ran two of their early shows about WP, and normally run around Boston gathering audio. Would be interested in doing something fun with 3 days of Wikimania. (They also have many other local radio contacts; Chris Lydon was one of the biggest radio personalities on public radio before spinning off his own show.)

Old notes

Notes

Notes | Updated bid

From the Colbert Report: "Ever walk into a room and everyone stops talking? That's how it feels to be America."

Crazy conference techniques : bids

Use of local support

• Media

  dividing up work with local papers/magazines/broadsheets

  processing inbound media requests, preparing outgoing kits and updates

• Rooms and accomodations

  preparing and cleaning rooms

  providing keys, information, etc to the info desk

• Information

  ref librarians at the welcome desk ;)

  info about attendees and presenters, for setting up small group chats, meals, etc. Suggesting stats and info to extract from the database

  Large poster design, printing, placement

• Sponsors, Presentation

  Working with local sponsors on related events in the weeks leading up to the conf

  Booth/table design and setup

  Spotlight filters, banners, flyers

• Recording and broadcasting

  audio, video, live transcripts; available within minutes of each event

Venue

Rooms

• For parallel sessions: Austin hall (A/V/Videoconf; room for 800 in 4 rooms)
• For large plenaries: Sanders Theater (room for 700/1000 with orch/balcony), $965/ 5-hr day

  Also Sci Center B (room for 500; $220/ 5-hr day)

Housing

Dorms

HLS dorms for 390-690 people. Good availability in the summer. Question: which building to put us in? Dorm oversight is changing hands this fall... contact: Anne Marie Cal'reso.

Couches Many locals will be here; there will also be couch space available (count: 5 couches and 7+ couchsurfers)

Schedule

Tech events

Hacking Days events

• Local-org interest : Brett S.
• Sponsorship : Media lab?
• Room interest : CS lounge + conf room.

Community & social events

Conference events

Speaker invitations

Panel planning

Satellite events

• Party for 800 people : where?
• Smaller party for speakers

  Where - M. of Science (100-person room), third-party sponsor? Fogg museum or Busch Hall?

• Outings into the city

  Historic tours - by foot; on bike

  Library and museum tours -

  Emerald necklace tour

  Walden pond/beach trips

Setup

Technical setup

Ambient network

provided @ HLS, media-lab; check Mus of Sci, &c

Supplementary LAN

Extra access points & routers

Conference software

Austin, Joerg (writing own system)

Tables, booths, chairs

Finances

Sponsorships

Sponsor contact

to ping: IBM Watson (next week), Novell (ditto)

to clarify: MIT Media Lab (details; hacking days), Berkman (difference in room rates)

Budgeting

Purchases and Receipts

help from Berkman for uni expenses.

Insurance

Largely provided via Harvard and MIT.

Media Amanda Brandon S Mainstream Media Local PRX, Open Source... Globe, Herald Global NYT; Fr/De/Ja press; Metro(!) New Media (Bloggers, et al) Local Boston blog & tech groups Global Global voices (multiling) Official sources Internal Wikimania blog setup, hosting; editorial team Dedicated Wikinews newsroom prep by Boston Wikinewsies. long/short story planning Transcripts / sudiocasts / videocasts English transcripts Other-lang real-time summaries, enhanced by translation (es/fr/de/ja) Collaborations FSF (ping) Media Lab (yes) Harvard Libraries (yes); Boston Library (ping) PBHA Multilingualism & Translation Harvard: Woodbridge Society | Int'l offices @ Harvard. Boston Language Institute? MIT : talk to Ilya... User:Ilya Boston groups : Hippo Family Michael Feldman. William Shatner panel. Print materials Banners & flags Signs & posters HLS printing shop Pamphlets, books Stickers, schwag Brett S - laptop stickers et al. Flash demo of campus. Team management News, archives & ref desk Jessamyn (& posse) University coordination +sj + Student group coord. +sj + Other volunteer coord. Legal Release forms For republishing/broadcasting. checks for photo-shyness Contracts Many handled by Berkman; contracts with other venues. pro-bono legal help...

University and school networks Harvard College Computer Society JP's ug law class Woodbridge (various) Law School Mary Br. (mbridges) JOLT group (various) Med School Carl Blesius (not yet) Ed. School Business School Kennedy School of Government Federico B - fbaradello@gmail (not yet) Hsing_Wei@ksg06 (not yet) Extension School Graduate School of Design GSAS MIT iCampus... Media Lab Electronic Publishing (Walter Bender) Future of Education (Seymour Papert) One-laptop-per-child (HDLI) Sloan Business School Other The education arcade CSAIL Other universities BC BU ... Brandeis Dave Eve (x2) (BS) Wellesley Matt G Northeastern Simmons Brandon Suffolk Tufts Brandon Erik T Wentworth Emmanuel Wheelock Emerson Lesley 6am with BS Other networks Education Boston high school consortia User:Mysekurity The Boston Foundation (helpful) Cambridge school volunteers Boston Partners for Education $100 laptop initiative Phillips Brooks' House (interest) RI Primary Paul Cuffee Dede @ Ed School Law Sister groups at Stanford & Oxford Technology Ximian/Novell SIGS : Techdinner / Gen dinners / Techbabes / Nonprofit Tech