Hi Anass,
Regarding the particular incident with Wikimedia Summit, I would suggest
your representative to communicate with the conference organizing team
directly about not getting any date of appointment before the conference
and they will contact with respective embassies and consulates. Like the
representative from your affiliate, I know of few others who did not get
their visa appointments, so when they contacted the organizing team, they
were given the support and respective embassies and consulates contacted
them and gave them appointment for submitting visa documents. I know this,
because I was one such candidate.
Regards,
Bodhisattwa
On Tue, Aug 16, 2022, 19:09 Eric Luth <eric.luth(a)wikimedia.se> wrote:
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(a)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(a)wikimedistas.uy>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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