Thanks Ellie,
Yes the scholarship program has done a lot for diversity here.
I think it might be worth doing such a mapping exercise and maybe making an
extra approach for communities that stand out as not having attended a
recent Wikimania. Of course accidents of geography and visa policy will
mean that some wikimanias are easier for some parts of the community than
others. But I would feel reassured if I knew that all our fifty largest
communities had had at least one member attend one of the last three
wikimanias, and or the half dozen largest communities that haven't had
anyone attend the last three wikimanias would get a special invite next
year.
On 12 November 2015 at 15:51, Ellie Young <eyoung(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 10:55 AM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Re: what is the purpose of wikimania?
I think the central purpose of Wikimania is to bring wikimedians together
and thereby enable things to happen.
We are a decentralised movement with a thousand Wikis, hundreds of
languages and a global community.
There are huge opportunities for wikimedians to share experiences across
those thousand different wikis, and Wikimania is one opportunity to create
links across languages and projects.
In a nearly fifteen year old organisation that in many ways is very
decentralised there is a big risk that different parts of the movement will
drift ever further apart and the organisation could fragment. Wikimania is
an investment in preventing that, and in getting links that cut across the
gaps between projects. It isn't the only thing we can or should do to build
links across projects. But in my view we should be doing more to build
links across our barriers of language and culture. For example have we done
an audit of the larger wiki communities against the wikimania attendees to
see which communities of any size have not had anyone attend wikimania?
No we haven't to my knowledge. From what I have seen in the past two
Wikimanias where we do have attendance data, the larger wiki communities
were well represented when the conference was in London, but not in Mexico
City. By and large almost every community does have someone representing
and this is mainly due to scholarship programs.
Ellie
~~~~
On 11 November 2015 at 13:50, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
uuh - i am not sure if one should open that can
of worms. what is the
> purpose of wikimania? is it to raise money?
for sure not. there are
> more intelligent ways to do that. is wikimania a business, i.e. the
> organizer want to get as much money out of the conference as possible?
> for sure not. there are other conference topics which are more
> promising.
If there is interest by participants to chip in on scholarships for
others to attend, I'm not sure providing an outlet for that interest means
opening any cans, full of worms or other critters. It's an efficient
matching of donor interest to funding needed.
Quite! I can certainly see there being people (probably some
Wikimedians) who would be interested in making a donation to help others
(certainly Wikimedians) to get to Wikimania. Much more interested than they
are in giving to WMF's general funds to pay for cups of coffee for
developers. Of course, this might result in very few donations and not be
worth the effort, but you don't know until you've tried it.
By contrast I'd guess that very few banner-campaign donors are
interested in Wikimania at all.
Chris
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Ellie Young
Events Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
eyoung(a)wikimedia.org
c. 510 701 8649
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