Viajero wrote:
In the past, I've been involved in a number of EU-funded projects among at times quite disparate participants, and it was always a given that such projects -- after being approved for funding -- got off to a start with a meeting with everyone involved. Sometimes this was the only time the participants met; they then went back to their respective countries and spent the duration of the project working in their offices and communicating by email and telephone. But that initial face-to-face was critical; it isn't something that can be measured in cold person/hour metrics but rather reflects some as yet not entirely well-understood psychological truth: long-distance, distributed projects work better when the participants have first met.
It is possible meetings can sometimes be helpful. However, they can be helpful in a number of cases:
* Wikipedians collaborating on writing an article meet to draw out an outline, or hammer out differences, or otherwise work on the article in person * Wikipedians researching an article visit national archives, national libraries, organizations' offices, embassies, or various other sources of information * Developers installing a new set of servers visit the colocation facility to do so in person * Developers working on software meet to draw up a design over a weekend, rather than back and forth over email * The board of trustees meets, as discussed
Of these five possibilities, which are only five of many, I don't see the last one as the most important, yet no one so far has proposed funding any of the previous four. Given that our primary project is currently an encyclopedia, I think if we are to fund any travel, it ought to first be that travel that contributes most directly to producing a high-quality encyclopedia. Therefore, if we are to have a travel fund, it ought to pay researchers and article writers. (The details, of course, are subject to debate.)
-Mark