On Tue, 6 Oct 2015 at 01:59 Lodewijk <lodewijk@effeietsanders.org> wrote:
Did anyone do a calculation whether holding it in an expensive city (say, London) with cheaper flights actually /is/ cheaper than holding it in a cheap city in Asia (say, Delhi or Mumbai)? And then I don't mean WMF-budget wise, but total costs: including the costs by all affiliates, and the costs privately paid for by the volunteers. I recall being positively surprised that there was very little difference between India and Berlin for the chapters meeting...

I've been doing this regularly for years in an ad hoc way. It informed the pick of areas. For example, the additional cost to the community of hosting Wikimania in Australia is (very roughly) US$1k extra per person from outside Oceania compared to the base cost, and US$1k less for each person in Oceania. At typical levels of 800 non-local self-funded attendees, of whom we have around 10 from Oceania, and 400 local people who wouldn't otherwise come at all, This means an additional community cost of ~US$750k (and a bunch more for Wikimedia organisational funds, paid directly from WMF or via the chapters) in return for the opportunity for 400 local Oceanians to attend who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity.

This is, clearly, not a completely unacceptable additional burden, but it is one we should take on carefully. By picking the venue for Wikimania we are not just 'awarding' some locals, but demanding a great many community people reach even deeper to try to attend, and for a great many, put it beyond their financial reach. Though Wikimedia organisational funds pay a huge amount for scholarships, almost entirely focussed on the less-represented countries in our community, but this does not (and cannot reasonably) cover the majority of attendees.

Off the top of my head, the numbers are roughly comparable for Latin America (slightly less for Mexico), a bit lower for South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe/Russia/Central Asia, and lower still for Asia Pacific and the Middle East and North Africa. The numbers drift from year to year a bit, but sadly there's not much impact on the overall headline whilst the editing community is so unequally geographically distributed.

This is why we included the call to area to get into the practice of having annual regional or sub-regional conferences. These would let a much larger portion of our community more easily afford to come to an in-person community event to share their passion, talk about what we can do to improve the projects, and learn new things. This is what the Wikimedia conferences, be they the global Wikimania or the regional "Wikimeetings" (people should suggest a great name!), should be about.

J.