Hi,
transparency on the selection can only work when also the application texts are public because we have many very active Wikimedians who are not very clear about what they ever did or actually do, how this is relevant to Wikimania and if they are able to and want to share this at Wikimania and back in their local communities afterwards. However, if only the results were published, there could be no useful discussion between the committee and others without information from the application texts.
But when applications are public, it would make absolutely no sense to have a committee for the selection because every decision by the committe could be easily be debated. When the expertise of the committee is questioned, people would be hesitant to participate as already described in this thread. Hence, only a public selection done by the community as a replacement for the committee would make sense.
When the community would decide on the applications, we had to define who would be part of that community: who's eligible to vote on these? should the votes be public? would large discussions be allowed? etc. As we have lots of experience with public elections, we can also easily name the disadvantages of these: Popularity contests for only those people who can stand public criticism, sometimes by few very loud destructive people or even enemy groups, on everything they every did. Tons of people would be refrain from applying at all, something we strongy have to face at the moment with elections for adminship or other committees as pointed out by Risker.
Of course, we had transparency as a result and more public discussions around the selection, but we would have no safe space for applicants at all (also in terms of sensitive data like personal living conditions and anonymity). I see no third working model besides these and my preference would clearly be the committee. But if you like, you can, of course, seek consensus on the other model. I will raise my concerns there as pointed out here.
Best,
Martin/DerHexer
(long-time scholarship committee member and co-organizer)
Von: Jonathan Cardy <werespielchequers@gmail.com>
An: Wikimania general list (open subscription) <wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Gesendet: 9:09 Mittwoch, 19.April 2017
Betreff: Re: [Wikimania-l] WMF Scholarships to attend Wikimania
Risker is right.
You can't publish such a table this year because it would break the promises made to applicants who were declined.
You could start a discussion on meta, and make a proposal to publish such data for future Wikimanias. I'd hope you wouldn't get consensus, but if you did we could then monitor the effect on the 2018 Wikimania. If the requirement to publish details on unsuccessful applicants as well as successful ones was deterring a significant proportion of applicants, or deterring certain types of applicants such as applicants from particular countries, then I'd hope 2019 would revert to the obviously superior system of not publicly listing the people who applied for scholarships but were declined. I do appreciate that in the future historians studying Wikipedia would really appreciate this data, and I can see the point of putting it in a sealed archive and publishing after all concerned have probably died. I'm not sure I see the point in publishing it now, if people are concerned about fairness then get someone you trust to run for the scholarship committee.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
I would like the Wikimedia Foundation NOT to do that. Our user privacy is to be respected. People who applied for scholarships had every reason to expect that the WMF would not publish their names if they were not awarded one, for example. Nobody who applies is guaranteed a WMF scholarship; however, several other organizations actively provide scholarships to community members who did not receive a WMF scholarship. Transparency does not require putting users into embarrassing or awkward situations, and many users who applied for scholarships may not have done so if they were told that the names and details of their application would be published. The scholarship committee is made up largely of volunteers, and they don't deserve the inevitable brickbats that would be thrown their way if particularly vocal members of the community disagreed with their decisions. And it's a given that just about every member of the community will disagree with one or more decision made by the committee. So no, please don't publish any details of any application, or how any individual candidate was assessed. That's not transparency.
Risker/Anne