HI folks,

Just a reminder that most of the world’s population lives in East and South-East Asia, so if you want us to participate in online meetings they really can’t be scheduled at 09:00 PT / 12:00 ET / 17:00 UTC. I’ve just received three invitations to sessions around those times, but that’s 6:00 AM for us in NZ and even worse for Australia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand etc. I had to pull out of Organizer Lab because the mandatory meetings were at 4 AM on a Saturday. The Wikimania 2022 Asia/Oceania day was scheduled 09:00–15:00, the middle of the night in Asia/Oceania.

If even half these meetings were scheduled at compatible times for our hemisphere, that would be great. Yes, that means people in Europe, the UK, and the US would sometimes have to get up early or stay up late. Welcome to my world.

Whenever I complain about this I get the usual responses: “We don’t have the resources to run a second session” (why not?), “We’re looking at running things at different times next time” (they usually don’t, or there’s no next time), “The meeting organisers are all in Europe/USA” (why? Isn’t this a global movement?).

If we’re happy with the Wikimedia Movement being dominated by Europeans and Americans, by all means keep scheduling events at the times most convenient for them

Right, I’ll stop complaining! This is a perennial problem, but some of us in Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand will be trying to raise awareness of it in 2023.

Cheers,

—Mike
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