I agree with the others that you are raising a really important point, Anass. Thanks for that.

I have tried to support visa applicants to two international Wikimedia events in Stockholm, the Wikimedia Diversity Conference in 2017 and Wikimania in 2019. It was frustrating even for me as organizer, and I can't even imagine how frustrating and disheartening it must be for the visa applicants.

After these two occasions, I have made a few simple conclusions.

If it is of high priority that visa applications are accepted, more funding for supporting the applications than one might think is needed. It is time consuming to support visa applications, but it does make a difference.
One reason why there needs to be plenty of funding for supporting the applications is that the embassies, at least the Swedish ones, work independently of each other. We tried to develop one process and timeline, but it failed because of all the embassies' own procedures and timelines. It is close to impossible to develop one structure or process, but support needs to be given to each applicant in their own process. If that is done, it does however increase the likelihood that the visa is approved.
For Wikimania, we were even more actively engaged in the visa processes as compared to the Diversity Conference – as we seemed to notice that it made a difference. We reached out to the embassies informing them about the upcoming conference, we were in close communication with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that organized a reception during Wikimania for WikiGap organizers, and even successfully appealed a rejection. All this took a lot of time, and not all applications were successful. But a higher proportion was successful as compared to the Diversity Conference.
We are not sure, but WikiGap seems to have made a difference in many embassies. That is, the Swedish embassy in a given country has after the WikiGap events a relationship to the Wikimedia movement, and might even know about the applicants, which in many cases seems to have led to more approvals. I am not sure if that is possible to repeat in more instances, but for us it shows at least that building relations might help.

I don't think, however, that we will ever reach 100% approvals. I thus also wholeheartedly agree with the previous message that we need to explore successful person / remote integration.

I also want to acknowledge the fact that I write this as a previous organizer. As the situation is of course much harder for all applicants, for me it is not about complaining, but trying to rase a few points that can perhaps increase the probability of approvals in more cases.

Best,

Eric Luth

Projektledare engagemang och påverkan | Project Manager, Involvement and Advocacy

Wikimedia Sverige

eric.luth@wikimedia.se

+46 (0) 765 55 50 95

Stöd fri kunskap, bli medlem i Wikimedia Sverige.
Läs mer på blimedlem.wikimedia.se

Den tis 16 aug. 2022 kl 14:51 skrev <eheidel@wikimedistas.uy>:

Thanks Anass for bringing this up! It's a very frustrating situation for community members to deal with visas. It's also worth noting that in certain cases there are places that request a visa from certain countries, but do not have an Embassy in the country they are requesting the visa from -- meaning that a community member has to travel to another destination (sometimes significantly far away!) in order to get paper processed. That takes money and time.

To me, the big elephant in the room is the need to re-imagine how we can do better integration of in person / remote events. The challenge here is that in the upcoming future it won't make sense from a carbon budget & climate perspective to fly people around the world, and we need to start designing more real decentralized events, not only to expect that we'll be able to plug a video screen somewhere and have in-person meetings while people watch from the outside (which doesn't lead to real participation / interaction).

Also, flights have gone up significantly -- plane tickets are double the amount that they were before the pandemic; this also will represent a challenge for conference organizers, because they will be able to fly even less people with the money allocated for the event. And also worth noting that from anyone outside of the US / Europe, flying to Europe takes *a lot of time*. How we are asking community members and volunteers to use their time it's a big part of the conversation about equity.

Sorry to hear that the visa issue has prevented a community member to bring their perspective fully into the table.
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