BT Proposal

What is Wikimedia?

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. Its projects include Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit.

Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, covering the United Kingdom. It is an independent organization whose goals are in common with the Wikimedia Foundation, and it is incorporated under the name "Wiki UK Limited", using Wikimedia UK as an operating name. It was approved as a chapter by the Wikimedia Foundation on 12 January 2009.

What is Wikimania?

Wikimania is an annual international conference held for users and supporters of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia, Wikinews and Commons. The first conference was held in Frankfurt, Germany in 2005. Subsequent conferences have been held in Boston, USA (2006), Taipei, Taiwan (2007) and Alexandria, Egypt (2008). Wikimania 2009 will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Last year saw the largest number of attendees with over 620 people attending the conference. The topics of presentations, papers and discussions include the Wikimedia Foundation projects, other wikis, open source software, and free content. Over the last 4 years, key note speakers important to the free and open source have included Ward Cunningham (developer of the first wiki), Richard Stallman (founder of the GNU project), Joi Ito (CEO of Creative Commons) and Lawrence Lessig (founding board member of Creative Commons).

2010 Oxford Bid

Each year the conference is typically hosted on a different continent, and given that it will have 5 years since the conference was hosted in Europe our chance of success are greatly increased. The organising of the bid will be carried out by volunteers and will be overseen by Wikimedia UK. We are looking to host the event in the town hall in Oxford. The venue can host 700 people and ...... Accommodation for the conference will be in two forms, the first will be in the University of Oxford Halls, and the second in local hotels. (Needs more here)

Sponsorship

The conference gathers interest at local, national and international levels given the prominence that the Foundation projects get with Wikipedia being the 7th most viewed website in the world and the only non profit site in the top 10. As with the running of the Wikimedia projects, the Wikimania conference is run entirely from sponsors and donations. Over the last 5 years, nearly £500,000 has been donated to support the conference with most of the support being derived from technology and communications companies. The sponsorship is structured each year,