For what it's worth, the program committee and the scholarship committee had international members. In my opinion, as the size of the conference grows, what is needed is not a full-time person at the foundation dedicated to Wikimania, but allocation in the Wikimania budget for full time staff of at least 2-3 people on the local team, in addition to the volunteers.
Wikimania 2012 was planned with some very hard work by amazing volunteers. We had no paid staff at all, unless you count our awesome event planner, who is a contractor, and our intern, who did not start until June.
Nicholas
Sincerely,
Nicholas Michael Bashour
President
Wikimedia District of Columbia
Washington, DC, USA
2012/7/5 WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers@gmail.com>
We have a problem in that the places where we have most editors and organisation are sometimes amongst the hardest to get visas for.
There is an easy solution - those of us who want events to take place in exotic places with open borders can help bids by doing helpful editing on their pages. I've helped several over the years, we could go broader on that. I don't see why the program each year couldn't be run by a multinational project team on Meta. The local team certainly need to advise on room sizes and distance between meeting rooms, but a lot of the work of choosing the submissions and organising the program could be done remotely. Obviously the more we do remotely the less needs to be done by the local organisers, and the less they need to do the more practical it is for smaller groups of Wikimedians to bid.
The ideal Wikimania venue is in a country that has very open borders, is currently relatively cheap and is a longhaul flight from the last two venues. Alexandria and Buenos Aires were perfect in all those regards. Of course not every venue is going to meet every criteria, and a global hub like London might wind up so much cheaper to get to that it's accommodation costs were moot. But if we do choose a country that is hard for people to get to in person then we should make that conference as accessible to live streaming and Eparticipation as we can, That's a hint to the DC organisers to remind us now how much they will live stream, and what else they will do for eParticipation. For example is there going to be a Skype chat room in one of the coffee lounges where people in Wikimania can talk to anyone who logs in? That would be a useful venue for people who wanted to ask a question of one of the presenters after watching a live feed. Better still we could have each presentation have a follow up Q&A session on Skype an hour later.
WSC
On 5 July 2012 09:53, Deryck Chan
<deryckchan@gmail.com> wrote:
As a response to this thread and a few others, I've created this page on the WM2012 wiki:
http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Visa_rejections
...in the hope that information gathered there will help future
Wikimania organizers assists participants to get visas and clear the
immigration process.
DeryckOn 4 July 2012 18:23, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Stephen Wanjau, 04/07/2012 19:01:
I wonder if there is a record somewhere that lists the prospective
attendees who didn’t attend Wikimania since they were denied Visa or on
any other grounds. Such a record would help us decide on future
Wikimania hosts with regards to easy of Visa acquaintance.
This is not needed. Visa problems were very well known when the decision has been made.
Nemo
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