On Aug 18, 2011, at 2:43 AM, "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <
nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> The big advantage of fixed sums is that you don't have to bother about
> people choosing the cheapest/most sensible flight, accommodation and so
> on, which is almost impossible to do; but then you have to choose a
> sensible amount making some calculations before.
> The requirement to do so is having serious statistics on the costs faced
> by the attendees; this implies very complex surveys in university
> systems, but should be easier for us, we don't need to be as efficient
> as the Studentenwerk (although I don't get how the linked questionnaire
> can help for the next Wikimania[1]).
> Then you have to decide what share of the estimated cost you want to
> cover: if it's too low the incentive in null (only people who would have
> attended anyway get the scholarship) and the money is wasted, if it's
> too high the effectiveness decreases because you have less recipients
> and because we don't have a way to measure the commitment and results
> (so an unknown amount of money will be wasted).
> So far the amount of partial scholarships has been chosen to be good for
> most attendees to maximize participation, but we could also decide to
> keep the share more or less the same for everyone and give different
> (fixed) amounts to different areas of the world, if we think that
> everyone should have the same incentive no matter the cost. I'm not so
> sure of that: perhaps it's more effective to maximize the participation
> of "locals" and for Wikiania 2012 it's better to give 2-3 (partial)
> scholarships to wikimedians from Mexico (or a far USA state) than 1 to a
> wikimedian from Europe (random examples).
>
> Nemo
>
> [1] And for Wikimania 2011, it would be more interesting to know an
> objective piece of information such as the number of partial scholarship
> recipients who refused it because it wasn't enough.
>
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