I think there is an impossible task have a country to host a Wikimania with all the ideal conditions. For an example, Canada and Mexico for better or worse share borders with US, and there are many geopolitical factors and mutual agreements derived from States strong advocacy around migration, travel regulations and such conditioning the visa procedures.

Many other factors of rejection unfortunately are strictly personal and not attributable to local organizers or WMF as lack of proving of funds to face an emergency, or evidence of "reasons" to come back to the origin country as jobs, family or schools. Talking with Foreign Affairs officials in Mexico in 2015, I know that they aware about people in the past abused of the attendance to (real or fake) international events to stay legal or illegal in the country which invited them with good faith.

I know that is not the case of any colleague in the movement, but we need to be aware about this strict rules and all the factors to consider around the process and do our best to get people safe and present in Wikimania cities.

Also I'm agree with Jonathan about kind of "next year" policy.

Best,

2017-07-04 10:45 GMT-05:00 Jonathan Cardy <werespielchequers@gmail.com>:

Hi Levin,

Of your three points:

1 Is good, but I can remember one winning bid where there was a very strong reassurance at the bid stage which then didn't really work out well during the organisation stage. I'm not going to name the bid, but I will say that people ask questions and not every answer is 100% delivered. If questions have not been asked recently we need to start asking them again ( I don't know if this was looked at during Montreal, I look at lots of Wikimania bids and often ask about visas, I don't remember looking at the Montreal bid).

2 Is a problem, some of the people who are going to have most difficulty getting visas are people who can only afford to come if they get a scholarship. Moving the whole scholarship process forward so we know who is going to come earlier would lose spontaneity of the event for others though it would help some get visas. But there are two things we could do. Firstly we could offer scholarships now to next year's Wikimania to scholarship recipients who couldn't get visas to Montreal (and do that each year - this is not a new problem or an easy one). Secondly we could move the scholarship process forward for people coming from countries where visas are likely to be slow to get for the next Wikimania. That could mean two rounds of scholarship applications, one for one group of countries and a few months later for people from other countries. Not perfect but practical and probably helpful.

3 I'm pretty sure there has been analysis, at least to the level of number of non attendees due to visa failure per Wikimania. For Privacy reasons we need to be very careful with any more detailed data, but that number should be known and each Wikimania team should be aiming to be low on that list.

Regards

Jonathan

On 4 Jul 2017, at 13:13, Levon Azizian <levonazizian@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear all,

Regarding mentioned, I have some suggestions on mitigation risks for the future what could be done.

1. Visa support should be an important component for hosting community. Thus, during the bidding process of new location of Wikimania (or other huge event), each proposal of location should be considered not only from the prospective of visa-friendly policy, but on preliminary negotiations between local chapter (community) and local authorities (MFA or whatever). Thus, if let's say community of New Zealand get some positive negotiation's result from MFA of NZ on participant's visa support, it should be considered as a plus for this bid.
2. After the bid was chosen, local team should provide to local authorities the list of all participants who will participate at event and make sure that central authorities will transfer the lists to embassies and this lists will make a sense when decision on visa is made by embassy. Maybe it is not the most interesting thing, but hosting communities should take care on ability of their guests to visit the country,
3. Analysis of history of visa applications of Wiki(m/p)edians. As I understand, we never did such analysis and it could be useful as for passed event, and for future events as well.

Regards,
Levon Azizian
Wikimedia Ukraine

2017-07-04 15:02 GMT+03:00 Harry Mitchell <hjmwiki@gmail.com>:
It strikes me that it would be helpful to focus on how we can improve the visa process for attendees from (predominantly) African and Asian countries rather than trying to find a utopia that has a very relaxed visa policy *and* a palatable government *and* political stability *and* modern infrastructure/transport links *and* is not excessively expensive for most people to get to. It's certainly not helpful t pounce on people for making good-faith suggestions, even if you think the suggestion is ludicrous.

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Iván Martínez
Presidente - Wikimedia México A.C.
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