On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 5:17 PM, Al Tally <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's now been a week since I got back. I enjoyed the actual conference, and > meeting everyone in person.
Hi. After Wikimania, we (Nina, Jakob, Kurt and me) went to Cairo for a few days. Some of us have since then gone east to Israel (Eilat, Tel Aviv and now Jerusalem). While my health condition had been slowly and unsteadily deteriorating since the second day of Wikimania, it took until yesterday when I got fever (39.5°C / 103°F) and other issues. I am under medication now, hopefully my status goes back to functional before we leave back to Germany. This has been my third Wikimania (after Frankfurt and Taipei) and I have a mixed bag of memories from Alexandria. The conference place was ideal for a conference about knowledge and it was a good decision to go to Egypt for reasons of geographic diversity and political statementary. Our flight from Frankfurt landed in Alexandria Borg el Arab at 2 a.m. and we (roughtly 10 Wikimedians) were picked up by the organisers. Since this airport is rather small, it was impossible to miss each other. Our group of four asked to be in one room, which was confirmed before Wikimania. At the dorms itself, we were told to sleep in seperate rooms (seperated by sex) at least for one night. I experienced the wikimania conference itself to be rather crowded and over-busy. With 20 minutes of a standard presentation, the effective time was usually a little bit less. When I went to the stage for my 20 minutes presentation, it took the - otherwise friendly - staff almost 5 minutes to set up the presentation computer. The Wifi-situation was a little bit annoying. After I figured out to manually set up an IP address and gateway and dns, I was able to access the net with reasonable speed. I missed any place to simply gather around with other Wikimedians. This has already been described and people who claim that Wikimania should happen in a place which offers both conference rooms and dorms in the same location are completely right, imho. It could also help to keep all the rooms open until midnight or something like that. Mathias _______________________________________________ Wikimania-l mailing list Wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
