An experiment I'd be more than willing to think about, is to have a 'real wikimania' every two years, and a more 'light edition' the other year (with less aimed attendance, less WMF participation, maybe less subsidised, a cheaper location, more like a wikicamp).
But, to look at that in a proper way, we have to know a bit more details, and that requires a good discussion, rather than a one-off survey.
Lodewijk
On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 6:48 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi,
Again, we have not "proven" in any way that it has to be cheap. When cheap comes at the prize of losing what is precious.
When we choose to ignore the cost of WMF travel of personnel, we effectively cook the books because the need for WMF inclusion is high. It is one of the aspects that makes Wikimania precious.
Much of the value of Wikimania is in meeting people from all over the world. This is happily ignored in a quest for a cheap experience. Thanks, GerardM
On 19 February 2016 at 02:06, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Chris & Ellie: I don't think I would include 'WMF Travel/Accomodation'
or
general Wikimedia PR in the Wikimania overhead.
- Staff have a budget for travel to events of all kinds; the Board has
a
budget for its meetings wherever they are held; and similarly the few committees that meet in person have a budget for those meetings.
- The fact that these things happen to take place at Wikimania is, if
anything, a slight cost savings: some of the logistics of scheduling and finding venues can be shared, it allows coordinating press events, &c.
Lodewijk, I agree: we should be able to find ways to limit direct
expenses,
and increase sponsorships. We could also increase the number of people
who
benefit from scholarships, or are otherwise able to attend.
Focusing on direct expenses from recent Wikimanias:
- 2014 budget: $250K revenue + a $150K WMF grant. Actual: $280K
revenue,
needed $320K from WMF to cover direct expenses
- 2015 budget: $150K revenue + a $300K WMF grant. Actual: $100K
revenue,
needed $380K from WMF to cover direct expenses
- 2016 budget: $290K? revenue + a $250K WMF grant.
Itzik, what were the equivalent budgets for Haifa? From the post-mortem
on
Meta it looks like a $280K budget, and a $100K WMF grant. This included paying for the event coordinator, which is now budgeted separately. That was for the finest event one could hope for.
Lodewijk writes:
'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...
Registration fees should at least cover the marginal cost of the event: catering & materials per person.
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.
The greater part of money spent on attending Wikimania is the
out-of-pocket
cost of flights and hotels. The cost of this for non-local attendees is 10-50x the cost of registration. Running many simultaneous local events has a greater total budget, if you look only at the budgets of the organizers; but a much lower cost per person. There are many more
options
for free venues and low-cost lodging when you're not scrambling to fit
1000
people in a small region of a city. And a smaller fraction of money
spent
goes towards jet fuel.
For this reason, the same pool of scholarship funds would go farther.
Finally, I don't think we should oversell the current Wikimania as a universal connector. I too want there to be a community thing that
builds
interpersonal connections and is accessible to every community member at low cost. But that thing cannot be a $2,000-net-cost week-long conference. Many people could never attend such an event, even if it
were
free. It is a long time commitment, and is inevitably mono or bilingual.
Sam (who loves the current Wikimanias, and thinks they should continue! but doesn't think they are the pinnacle of what movement-gatherings could be)
On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 5:52 PM, Sam Klein sjklein@hcs.harvard.edu wrote:
That's most helpful, thank you both.
On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 5:14 PM, Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks, Ellie and Chris, this historical experience should be very
helpful
for future discussions!
Best, Pharos
On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 5:06 PM, Chris Schilling < cschilling@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hey folks,
Ellie has put together a summarized budget including revenue and
expenses
from Wikimania 2014 in London[1] and Wikimania 2015[2], which I've
gone
ahead and posted to the summary pages of these conferences on meta.
Thanks,
Chris
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2014 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2015
On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 1:15 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com
wrote:
Itzik writes:
> If we want to talk about the cost of Wikimania it will be great
if
the
WMF and the local team will share the costs. > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2014/Budget > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2015/Budget > Maybe I missed something, but it's strange that such discussion
takes
place without a real budget breakdown. > To summarize 2 huge event to "1$ 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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