I mostly agree with a lot of the thoughts here about whether or not it would be more cost effective to do one event or multiple events, at least organizationally.
There are two things that cross my mind when we talk about this:
First, maybe one of the bigger drivers of cost is the time of year when we are holding these events. June-July-August is the most expensive period for just about everywhere in the world; March, April, September and October tend to be much less expensive in lodging, travel and direct conference costs. Maybe we need to rethink *when* we are holding Wikimania as much as anything else.
Secondly, while there are some pretty well articulated disadvantages to holding separate conferences, it is far more likely that Wikimedians who have to pay their own way (the majority of attendees, incidentally - and almost all from "Western" countries) will be able to attend a regional conference than an international one. The same scholarship dollars go much further, and so on. In a lot of cases, governmental travel restrictions are significantly lessened as well. This is something that those of us in Europe and North America easily forget - we rarely have to obtain visas and we generally have far more disposable income to attend these events.
Risker/Anne
On 18 February 2016 at 19:04, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
The first thing that happens when you split up something like Wikimania in multiple events is you multiple the cost of WMF attendance because they need to deliver the same messages multiple times, an alternative decision to restrict who goes where you run into the issue of regions being treated differently or even getting a different message. Add to that the BoT would need to also attend multiple events in some form and other committees will still need to meet somewhere as well as have a presence at each event.
So what happens do we then say well since it'll be divisive to attend only some of the meetings WMF and BoT dont attend any that makes them more isolated from the wider community than they already are. Wkikmania may be expensive exercise and draw on a lot of resources but going smaller wont logically create combined cheaper outcomes.
On 19 February 2016 at 07:19, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Thanks, it is a step in the right direction indeed. Although a bit more breakdown would be helpful, I'm guessing this also highly fluctuates year by year. Some observations:
A huge amount of money goes into flying WMF around the world (321k resp. 383k), which doesn't even take into account (I'm assuming) all the hours invested into it.
I'm assuming 'donations' includes sponsorships. That amount is less than
I
would have expected/hoped. Registration income is low, as expected (the burden would just be moved to a different part of our movement: the community)
'wikimania direct' is quite expensive, to be honest, and much more than I would have expected. However, it does include catering, which is always
an
expensive chunk (5days * 1000 people will even at a quite low 30 dollar
per
day easily give 150k, not even counting the parties etc).
Many of these costs would still exist if you split the event up in
multiple
events spread out. WMF would still want to fly everywhere (board has to meet anyway, WMF staff wants to engage anyway, committees have to meet somewhere), catering won't be much cheaper if spread over multiple
events,
and don't underestimate the manpower it would take to organise all those events - relatively it may be even more.
So looking at these figures, I can agree that it should be possible to do it for less, I'm less certain though whether the proposed splitting up would significantly reduce the total costs for everything that is
included
here.
Lodewijk
On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 11:52 PM, Sam Klein sjklein@hcs.harvard.edu wrote:
That's most helpful, thank you both.
On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 5:14 PM, Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks, Ellie and Chris, this historical experience should be very
helpful
for future discussions!
Best, Pharos
On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 5:06 PM, Chris Schilling <
cschilling@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Hey folks,
Ellie has put together a summarized budget including revenue and
expenses
from Wikimania 2014 in London[1] and Wikimania 2015[2], which I've
gone
ahead and posted to the summary pages of these conferences on meta.
Thanks,
Chris
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2014 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2015
On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 1:15 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com
wrote:
Itzik writes:
> If we want to talk about the cost of Wikimania it will be great
if
the
WMF and the local team will share the costs. > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2014/Budget > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2015/Budget > Maybe I missed something, but it's strange that such discussion
takes
place without a real budget breakdown. > To summarize 2 huge event to "1$ million USD" does not make
sense.
Agreed 1million%. It would be important to see a rough cost
breakdown, &
compare that to the best-budgeted Wikimanias.
On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 9:52 AM, Tomasz Ganicz <
polimerek@gmail.com>
wrote:
> 2016-02-10 6:06 GMT+01:00 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com: > > > FUDCons > > Also it is hard to compare Wikimanias with FUDCons as it is > a) much smaller (usually bo more than 200 attendees) > b) divided by regions - for example in 2015 there were 3
FUDCons
> (Argentina, India, Spain) and 2 Flocks (NY and Kraków) - so
they
are
> rather like our Iberecop or CEE meetings than the global
conferences.
>
Thanks. Similar to regional events perhaps, not Wikimania.
Still
worth
comparing budgets perhaps, if available.
But I was wondering about the trend over time: whether extensive
funding
during the RedHat days made the events less useful, in the years
after
that
funding was reduced.
> And also Fedora developers have many potential sources of
external
funding > - mainly from IT companies which uses free software and want to
apply
for
> their specific needs and for whom they quite often work. >
True. But attendees to GLAM or education conferences also tend
to
have
many potential sources of funding - mainly from archives or
educational
or
technical companies who curate knowledge or develop education
tools.
And
we
have IT industry partners who are similarly willing to support
Wikimanias.
Not entirely dissimilar.
> But anyway, Fedora offers scholarships for attendees, see: >
Yes, wiki conferences should as well - that part of conference
funding
is
important. Even early Wikimanias with almost no WMF support had significant scholarship pools.
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