Hi Levin,
Of your three points:
1 Is good, but I can remember one winning bid where there was a very strong reassurance at
the bid stage which then didn't really work out well during the organisation stage.
I'm not going to name the bid, but I will say that people ask questions and not every
answer is 100% delivered. If questions have not been asked recently we need to start
asking them again ( I don't know if this was looked at during Montreal, I look at lots
of Wikimania bids and often ask about visas, I don't remember looking at the Montreal
bid).
2 Is a problem, some of the people who are going to have most difficulty getting visas are
people who can only afford to come if they get a scholarship. Moving the whole scholarship
process forward so we know who is going to come earlier would lose spontaneity of the
event for others though it would help some get visas. But there are two things we could
do. Firstly we could offer scholarships now to next year's Wikimania to scholarship
recipients who couldn't get visas to Montreal (and do that each year - this is not a
new problem or an easy one). Secondly we could move the scholarship process forward for
people coming from countries where visas are likely to be slow to get for the next
Wikimania. That could mean two rounds of scholarship applications, one for one group of
countries and a few months later for people from other countries. Not perfect but
practical and probably helpful.
3 I'm pretty sure there has been analysis, at least to the level of number of non
attendees due to visa failure per Wikimania. For Privacy reasons we need to be very
careful with any more detailed data, but that number should be known and each Wikimania
team should be aiming to be low on that list.
Regards
Jonathan
On 4 Jul 2017, at 13:13, Levon Azizian
<levonazizian(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,
Regarding mentioned, I have some suggestions on mitigation risks for the future what
could be done.
1. Visa support should be an important component for hosting community. Thus, during the
bidding process of new location of Wikimania (or other huge event), each proposal of
location should be considered not only from the prospective of visa-friendly policy, but
on preliminary negotiations between local chapter (community) and local authorities (MFA
or whatever). Thus, if let's say community of New Zealand get some positive
negotiation's result from MFA of NZ on participant's visa support, it should be
considered as a plus for this bid.
2. After the bid was chosen, local team should provide to local authorities the list of
all participants who will participate at event and make sure that central authorities will
transfer the lists to embassies and this lists will make a sense when decision on visa is
made by embassy. Maybe it is not the most interesting thing, but hosting communities
should take care on ability of their guests to visit the country,
3. Analysis of history of visa applications of Wiki(m/p)edians. As I understand, we never
did such analysis and it could be useful as for passed event, and for future events as
well.
Regards,
Levon Azizian
Wikimedia Ukraine
2017-07-04 15:02 GMT+03:00 Harry Mitchell <hjmwiki(a)gmail.com>om>:
It strikes me that it would be helpful to focus
on how we can improve the visa process for attendees from (predominantly) African and
Asian countries rather than trying to find a utopia that has a very relaxed visa policy
*and* a palatable government *and* political stability *and* modern
infrastructure/transport links *and* is not excessively expensive for most people to get
to. It's certainly not helpful t pounce on people for making good-faith suggestions,
even if you think the suggestion is ludicrous.
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