I like this vision very much. Like Lodewijk, I suggest the scholarships piece should not be bid specific.
I've been thinking a great deal about scholarships, travel, and attempts to build community via jet fuel. Some thoughts off the top of my head for the new year:
I don't understand why the current scholarship criteria make no mention of need. Are they meant to be for newcomers, or for the same community members each year?
I too am concerned that the current scholarship process tends to polarize the community, and too often simply rewards long-time community members, or those who are connected to large movement entities, with free travel: rather than increasing the diversity of new voices and faces at global events.
I think we should match every Euro spent on travel support with a Euro spent on infrastructure for great virtual participation: cameras, projectors, and video-screens for communities around the world (physical tools they can keep and use for years); making space to share the faces and voices of people who are unable to travel to the event; live-streaming hubs stationed around the event itself; and support for getting all videos up online within 24 hours.
I do remember why we moved away from finding other entities and institutions to provide travel support: it seemed 'easier' to do it ourselves. But as a result we are no longer empowering foundations that care about global dialogue to support Wikimedia in this way; and we are no longer learning from their criteria and understanding of the world.
This seems related to why we are funding so much of Wikimania directly from global donations, rather than developing the fundraising and sponsor-finding skills of our international community. This centralization of how Wikimania and scholarships are funded makes the conference less robust. It sets future conference up for failure: or at least an awkward transition if we stop spending so much on them.
IIRC, the Fedora community faced this years ago: they initially were thrilled to organize themselves at global events without much travel support. Then RedHat started paying for the travel of most of the core developers and community members. When they later stopped this, the core community members stopped coming: they now felt that a full scholarship was their due. It took a while for the conferences to become as useful again.
SJ
On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
Hello, today I and Martin have polished the scholarship vision/program for our Wikimania 2015 bid: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Esino_Lario/Scholarships. Considering a background and aiming for a long-term impact on the Wikimedia mission, we propose the following principles: Transparency; Accountability and self-reflection; Grassroot; Efficiency and fairness; Innovation. From those we identify 4 external needs and 8 goals. Please read the proposal and edit boldly or comment on talk page or wherever. Keep in mind it's still a draft, not the official WMIT proposal yet. While the bids warm up and the Wikimania discussion is still quiet, we think it's useful for everyone to focus the discussion on some specific areas in advance. (And if all bids adopt our idea of scholarships, all the better!)
Nemo
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