I think it doesn't hurt to go over how festival planning derived at AW, as best my aging brain can remember (correct me if I'm wrong!) But as we plan ahead, sometimes it helps to know how things happened previously.

Originally, we had a "Beta-Launch" festival 3/30/02 to celebrate the beta-launch of the site, and then "Gold Launch" in October, 2002, when Jot 'officially' opened the site.

I'm not quite sure, but think it was probably 2003 when we did a small spring festival site-wide; then during that year, the two-per-year festival idea took hold among demis and scribes, a spring festival, then a fall one to celebrate our 'anniversary.'

In 2005, after a series of discussions about how tiring two site-wide (all 8 world) festivals were here at The Curia, it was proposed to break down and try a new concept in 2005-6: of Goldfest, then Springfest, involving only four worlds at a time. The concerns leading to this decision were:

a. The 8-world festivals were running anywhere from a week to (?was it 2003) spread out over 6 weeks. This was hard on the scribes.

b. There were concerns that many of the "one-day-one-world" festivals were just too much for our members and that those at the tail end of the festival had much less participation than those in the beginning.

c. We wanted to play with the concept of 'merging' talents from the participating worlds to create truly site-wide projects.

Well, we tried that in Goldfest. The short and snappy four-day four-world festival was built around many shared theme projects. I believe strongly this was MUCH harder to do, by grams and emails, than simply doing independent events in each world, but the Goldfest team did a wonderful job of it.

We then decided to do the same for Springfest.

Anyway, this is a brief summary of what we've tried. And I do believe, going back to just one site-wide festival involving all 8 worlds, is probably the best choice.

There's also something to be said for ONE festival that gathers up a rush of anticipation and participation, as opposed to several which spread it around.