I think it is totally fair to count this as costs - however, you're right that you should also try to estimate the other side of the equation: gains. The conversation between two staff members is a gain, as is community liaison work. Improved networks too, etc. But this is all much more subjective and harder to measure or even estimate. 

Lodewijk

2013/8/26 WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers@gmail.com>

Be careful how you measure things, sometimes there will actually be savings here, often there will be costs that would have been incurred regardless of Wikimania. For example two chapter staff members at Wikimania discuss something in person that they would have discussed by phone. If you count the cost of their time at Wikimania then you might cost it as 3 days of each of their time for Wikimania. But if a staff member is using part of their time at Wikimania to meet people who they would otherwise have called then it would be wrong to count their full salary cost for those three days against the Wikimania budget. There may even be a saving on international phone calls. 

This could be quite significant as there were many WMF and Chapter staff at Wikimania. Some of their time will be because of Wikimania, but I suspect that much, hopefully most of their time will have been spent on things that Wikimania enabled. So a panel of developers taking questions from the community at Wikimania should in my view be counted as part of the community liaison work of those developers. To some extent this is an accounting exercise. There is a natural desire to get a "true cost" of Wikimania. But it would be easy to get a false picture of that cost if you simply count the cost of employing all those who are staff and also the travel and accommodation.

Regards

On 25 August 2013 20:31, Lodewijk <lodewijk@effeietsanders.org> wrote:

Hi Itzik,

probably staff time spent on preparing/attending the conference should also be included. 

And perhaps also how much volunteers spent on attending from their own budget (this necessarily would have to be an estimate based on flight & accommodation). While this is no 'donor money'  it is definitely cost to the movement. 

Lodewijk

2013/8/25 Itzik Edri <itzik@infra.co.il>

Hi,

I know it may be too early to ask that, but I promise to send another notification related this issue in the coming months :)

We started last year to make the Wikimania costs more transparent. Wikimania is our biggest and the most expensive project. To ask our self "how much Wikimania costs" we can't only look on the project budget, as the total cost involve also scholarships (from WMF and chapters) and delegations of the chapters and the WMF.

We have tracking pages on Meta about Wikimania 2011 and Wikimania 2012 (sadly the organizer team of 2012 didn't updated their costs till now...), and I opened a new page for Wikimania 2013.

So again, I know to some of you this is too early to put the costs (although the size of the chapters and WMF delegation is known and could be update also now) - but if you can, do it now. If now, remember to do it what you have the numbers.

The data requested is your chapter\wmf delegation and the number of scholarships your chapters gave. 

Thanks,

Itzik

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