congratulations everybody.. the alex bid in wikimania 2007 is already advanced into the shortlist..

i must say that i'm sorry i've been too lazy the last days in posting about what's happening in alex bid.. this was because of lots of things happening everyday and lots of meetings, the main target in the last phase was that we provide infos about alexandria and the bibliotheca alexandrina where the conference will be held if we won the bid isA.

now, the current phase is that we are being asked questions and we answer tham, this can be managed by us alex members who are involved right now along with the BA stuff who are offering us a good support along with other contributers. who wanna join us in alex please mail me.

our main competitors now is Torino, Italy.. we have other competitios too (London and Taipei, Taiwan) .. the main streangth in torino is that their spensors are offering full coverage of accomodation and lunches.. of course we didn't offer such a thing.

this the support we need from eglug guys everywhere now.. we need spensors.. we need ones who will pay alongside with ones who will try to help, academic places,.... etc.

we need another thing.. as this event is getting bigger, can our admins offer us a subdomain in eglug (e.g alexmania.eglug.org)?

we want to have suggestions too.. what do you think we can do? as for eglug community i have 3 missions in my mind:

• spensors
• raising the FOSS awareness in egypt in general during this year (the event should be around august 2007)
• advertising about such an event when we get near to its time.

the spensors we have should be confirmed before September 23th as much as we can, this is important cause the evaluation is on that time.. I have a powerpoint presentation ready to demonstrate the event and i'm ready to send it to who wants it.. may be our admins can allow me to upload it here?

at last, the following are the notable speakers in wikimania 2005, 2006:

• Richard Stallman | founder of the Free Software Foundation
• Ward Cunningham | the inventor of the Wiki
• Jimmy Wales | co-founder of Wikipedia
• Brewster Kahle | director and co-founder of the Internet Archive
• Gary Price | Director of Online Information Resources at Ask.com
• Eben Moglen | Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center
• Karen Christensen | cofounder and CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group
• Jim Giles | news and features editor for Nature magazine
• Michael Eisen |co-Founder of Public Library of Science (PLoS)