Cary Bass wrote:
The Jury for Wikimania 2008 bids have met and are pleased to announce that Wikimania 2008 will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.
I'm offended that the desire to have Wikimania hop around the globe (rotation) trumps the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other civil rights (local laws). While visitors to Egypt are certainly not at the same risk, I refuse to spend any money in a country that -- as recently as 2004 -- sentenced someone to 17 years of prison and two years of hard labor for posting a personal ad on a gay website[1]. A blogger was imprisoned in 2007 for four years for "insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt."[2] Jimmy Wales even attended the Amnesty conference denouncing the censorship. No legal or cultural reforms since give me confidence that the situation has improved.
Wikimedia and its projects have an abundance of people from marginalized groups and political advocacy organizations participating at every level. A place that persecutes, censors, and prosecutes such groups under the banner of snuffing out "Satanism" is not a location that affirms the pluralism and intellectual freedom of Wikimedia.
People raised these objections early in the bidding process, but I have yet to see a response that extends beyond the immediate safety of conference attendees. (And even those responses failed to address the danger for transgender and transsexual community members.) Even if we don't risk anything ourselves, we should care about more than our own safety: where we hold a conference shows what we consider acceptable.
The "points" system that arrived at this decision strikes me as shallow and inhuman, a failed attempt at giving the process a veneer of objectivity. With arbitrary categories of equal weight, why should anyone expect it to yield a good result? Even then, all the public sees is a bunch of numbers without justifications or accountability. When I buy a car, I don't create the categories "exterior color," "interior color," "CD player," and "starts up" with equal weight, yet "social areas" weighed equally with "local laws" in the bidding process. How useful are these "social areas" to the parts of our community whose social activities, even appearance, include aspects that would be dangerous in public Egyptian life? How many "points" is their freedom worth?
Alexandria was once distinguished as being the site of the Great Library, but the Egypt of today has more in common with the society that burned the library than the one that built it. Don't expect to find me at Wikimania 2008 Alexandria.
Sincerely, David Strauss
[1] http://www.gaymiddleeast.com/country/egypt [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6724531.stm