[Foundation-l] A question for the Wikimania jury

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 12:46 AM, Judson Dunn <cohesion at sleepyhead.org> wrote:
> This idea that having a Wikimania in your area is outreach is really
>  odd to me. Do we think that more than a handful of people in
>  Alexandria that have never heard of Wikipedia will join because of a
>  convention at the library? Seems unlikely to me. It's a user
>  convention, not an advertising campaign. The two are pretty different.

I agree with this sentiment, especially when you couple it with the
common defense of the Alexandria Wikimania that conference goers are
"safe" because they tend to stick to themselves and do not interact
with the local populace too much. In fact, this kind of isolationism
is one of the biggest reassurances that we've received thus far about
safety in Alexandria. No safety concerns have been raised yet about
Buenos Aires (and I personally don't expect many), however if such
concerns were raised you could bet that people would say "you'll be
safe if you just stick with the group and don't go wandering out into
the city".

If anything, having a Wikimania in your area is going to spur
interest, among wikimedians, in the local chapter. That is,
wikimedians who live in Argentina will be more likely to participate
in activities of the Argentina chapter. However, given the stance of
isolationism by conference attendees (both preached as a security
measure, and given in anecdotes from previous wikimanias), it's
unreasonable to expect that having Wikimania in Buenos Aires is going
to have a positive impact in attracting non-wikimedians to our cause.

>  I don't absolutely hate this choice, but I would love to see the
>  criteria get changed to something more along the lines of making it a
>  priority that the most *contributers* to the projects can attend. If
>  this means the *user convention* rotates from Europe, to Japan, to the
>  US, so be it. That's where the people are who want to go. If more
>  people go, more people will pay to attend, and we can afford more
>  scholarships for the people who have to go a long way.

This brings up another question that I have, how are recipients
selected for these scholarships? If I knew that I was going to be
traveling to the selected destination fro free, I might be inclined to
pick a place without consideration for travel budget at all. Or, worse
yet, I might be inclined to pick a location that I wanted to visit
personally, but was outside my typical travel budget. I'm not making
any allegations about corruption among jury members here, just saying
that money is a big deal for people.

It may be time, that we seriously start to consider the concept of
having multiple Wikimania events, more then one per year and spread
out around the globe. Our organization is very large, and I think we
could fill multiple such conferences with willing attendees. We would
have the ability to get more people involved in these events, and
people wouldn't have to wait several years until the jury selection
rotated back to their home continent. I'm not offering this as some
kind of knee-jerk replacement for Buenos Aires, but maybe it's the
route we need to take starting in 2010?

--Andrew Whitworth