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(a)gmail.com>om>:
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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