Talk:London Wikimania Bid

Visa

UK is not part of schengen, thus your map for visas is wrong (en:Schengen Area). --90.212.41.34 15:55, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for pointing that out. I have removed it. The correct map is here, but it doesn't seem to work on this wiki. -- Marek.69 ^talk 13:46, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Now fixed -- Marek.69 ^talk 15:21, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Bristol's too far away

Bristol's too far away. Hold it in London so I can go there!Pdiddyjr 19:24, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

WiFi

I notice that weakness 4 says "the WiFi in place at the Olympic Village will not have been designed with hundreds of Wikipedians in mind". This is going to be part of East London Tech City. They are going to really want to make sure that WiFi isn't a weakness. They can use the fact that WiFi has been insufficient at previous places as a selling point for their fancy new facility when it all goes smoothly. I suggest that whoever has been talking to Tech City discuss this with them and get reassurance that it's all going to be fine. Yaris678 14:58, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Well previous venues have thought they'd be able to cope with the strain of hundreds of people editing Wikipedia (which is more strenuous on the infrastructure, I believe, than just accessing Twitter and Facebook like most people would at most conferences) and it has only been discovered that they couldn't when everybody is there. I will talk to Ed, though, and he can mention it when discussions progress. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:59, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Cool. As I said, if they can make it work and everyone is impressed after the event, then Tech City can use it as a big selling point for their facilities... so it might be worth mentioning that to them. Yaris678 16:43, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

As I touched on on the general bid discussion page; Wifi is always a stalling point because it is easy to under-estimate the requirements. However, Yaris has a solid point in that we could try to encourage them to install really good infrastructure as part of the refurbishment. Whether that is viable I don't know; I haven't been updated recently on exactly what is happening and where we are going (I assume *someone* is working on a budget proposal right now, or we're going to be running very fine) - I know that is my fault for not making it to the Wikimeet :P --ErrantX 16:58, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

You guys may wish to talk to the organisers of barcamplondon. We've handled events with 250-300 geeks who tend to bring multiple devices (phones, laptops, tablets etc.) to events and use the living crap out of the wifi. This is all something resolvable, but you have to specifically work with the venue and with suppliers, and tell them that you are going to need excess capacity. The way we ended up solving it was to tell venues and suppliers to expect that for wifi purposes they were going to have 600-700 people rather than 250-300 people. Most don't include enough excess capacity. There are basically three issues: bandwidth (you need more of it than you think), wifi hotspots that are running on different channels (and supplying the full range of a/b/g/n frequencies that you are allowed), number of local subnet IP addresses, and the speed of the DHCP server.

Also having admins and maybe stewards on site to unblock the IP for all the different wikis an international audience might want to edit, but I don't need to explain that, right?

I might be able to coax one of my fellow BarCamp organisers to come along to a London meetup to discuss this with Wikimania planners. —Tom Morris (talk) 16:23, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I also recommend reading Why is Internet access and Wi-Fi always so terrible at large tech conferences? on ServerFault. Even with a big, commercial budget (which Wikimania is unlikely to have given that it is usually less than 50 USD per ticket), conference wifi is hard and requires a lot of up-front planning to do right. —Tom Morris (talk) 16:33, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Move to Meta?

Hey. :-)

What's the plan about moving this to meta? Other bids are piling up there and it'd be good to have them developed on a more high-visibility wiki for others to see...

Jdforrester 17:48, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I thought the idea was for one of the two bids to be agreed on internally, before one was then put forward internationally. I may be wrong, though. :-) Regards, Rock drum (talk • contribs) 17:53, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

That's what I thought too. And don't you mean Wikimania 2013 bids? -- Trevj 10:48, 25 November 2011 (UTC)