On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: It's been my experience that Wikimedians are often unwilling (to the point of disruption) to make public their own names, much less the names, addresses, and phone numbers of their closest family members. They'll reluctantly provide them to a trusted authority, confidentially, if given a good reason (as with Wikimania registration), but there's no way even I'd post them on an [[Emergency Contact List]]. I wouldn't be much more confident in a database kept by RandomWikipedian2048. We're talking about one more optional field on the Wikimania registration form, which an organizer can pull up and act on in the unlikely event of an emergency. This shouldn't be a big deal. Austin

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: [snip] In the message I responded to you stated that the collection of emergency contact information would present considerable privacy concerns. Here you seem to be suggesting that the foundation would instead prefer to pass off the collection to a volunteer driven project. This seems like a completely inconsistent position, but perhaps I just do not understand. [snip] I'm at a bit of a loss as to what means could possibly be more efficient and effective than simply adding a single additional field to the official Wikimania registration form. Could you please elaborate? [snip] I'm sorry, I haven't really been following these threads and only tuned into this one because it was thread-broken and looked like a new thread. The last I saw on this subject was your message dated Fri, Apr 18, 2008. As far as I could tell it included 6 questions directly related to safety and security (Qs 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11) and with the exception of 11 (contact with the Egyptian government) all were clearly delegated to the local team. Some of the earliest concerns about safety were raised after the safety advice provided by the local team were found to be in direct contradiction with advice provided by professional travel agents (in, particular with respect to advisable dress for women). It was the belief of some, myself included, that although the local team has the greatest access to information they may, understandably, not be the most objective parties available to assess the risks and mitigations specific to their region and its local cultures. With that in mind I hope you can understand why some people are dissatisfied that the foundation's response to concerns about safety is to restate that those issues have been delegated to the local team. Given the large volume of mail that has already been exchanged on this subject I do not expect that a uniformly agreeable fully solution will be found. I do hope that the foundation will at least accept the easiest and most harmless measures, such a collecting an emergency contact list, clearly promoting objective third party travel guides on the conferences information pages, etc...