Wikimania 2011/Bids/Toronto/Q&A

Questions

Does your team or its members have any past experience organizing an event?

What kind of event and with how many people?

We have experience with organizing IT/programming events with over 350 attendees, 35 volunteers, 9 paid student workers, and 1 paid senor AV technician.

Further, I was a general volunteer at some shorter (2-hour, non-IT related) events with over 600 attendees. Raysonho 20:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Is your team or its members in close contact with organizations also interested in the free and open knowledge?

Are they prepared to cooperate with you in the organization and realization of Wikimania 2011?

There are 2 large groups performing research on free and open knowledge:

KMDI — KMDI (stands for Knowledge Media Design Institute) is the first virtual institute at the University of Toronto. With over 150 faculty members, associates, and graduate students, many of its research projects are related to open access and open knowledge, including ePresence, Project Open Source | Open Access. KMDI is our partner in this bid, and will be offering us the conference venue at a low cost.

The Harriet Tubman Institute at York University. One of the research projects at Tubman is the Endangered Archives Programme, which is sponsored by the British Library to digitize many of the world's vanishing archives. During Endangered Archives Workshop 2010, I gave a short talk Archives and Wikipedia, and I got good feedback, and people are interested in working with Wikipedia and open access. Raysonho 20:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Do you plan to implement any ideas to improve the experience of those participants that might not be particularly proficient in English?

With 41% of its population born outside of Canada, Toronto is one of the most diverse places culturally, linguistically, and religiously in the world.

The official language in Canada are English and French. Our team has members who know Chinese and French. My first language is Chinese, and I learned a little French and Spanish a while ago. So I think we have the languages spoken by over 80% of the world's population covered.

If we could gather enough interest, I am interested in organize a Chinese track. Raysonho 20:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

What are your biggest security concerns, and what measures will you be taking to try to avoid them?

Toronto is in general a safe place, and on the University of Toronto's campus the crime rate is further extremely low.

However, we will be spending some of our budget on insurance, so that our attendees are covered in case any accidents occur (Murphy's law). Raysonho 20:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Has any member of the organising team attended a past Wikimania?

I attended more than 25 conferences since I started working in the IT industry in 2000, but I was not able to leave Canada during to my busy schedule. However, if Wikimania is held in Canada, then I will be able to attend for the first time in my life! Raysonho 20:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)