It's good that we're discussing the hurdle for someone to get their first scholarship to participate in Wikimania. In addition to the suggestions in the other thread, I'd like to lead an initiative to help future applicants who want their first-ever Wikimania scholarship.
As a successful Wikimania 2017 scholarship applicant, I'm publishing on-wiki all my answers to the scholarship application form, except personal information:
I encourage all other successful scholarship applicants to do the same. If you kept a draft of your application form, redact any personally identifiable information and publish it on wikimania2017wiki. This will help future scholarship applicants get a feeling of what the reviewers are looking for.
Deryck