[Wikimania-l] CD

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Sumana Harihareswara
<sumanah at wikimedia.org> wrote:
<snip>
> An agent asked me, at the Tel Aviv airport, what community or
> congregation I belonged to.  I didn't understand at first, and my first
> thought was, "the free software community, I guess?"  The community that
> congregates at Wikimania, that I'd come to Haifa to celebrate.

This is my favorite quote from this thread :) I feel similarly.

I had a conversation with a dear friend near the end of Wikimania that
went something like this:
- "It is terrible that preemptive travel security screening is so
often demeaning and inefficient; it seems like there has to be a
better way."
- "And a way that doesn't perpetuate a culture of fear and racism"
- "Well, if we really wanted to find a distributed global solution we
could unleash 1,000 Wikimedians on the problem."

:-)

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 11:05 PM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
> Serious suggestion for the future, amongst the many criteria we use to judge
> bids for Wikimania we not only need to add "Who isn't allowed to go there or
> wouldn't be allowed in" but also something about the attitudes of the
> authorities.

Wikimania is educational for many reasons -- not least it is always an
education in international travel restrictions and travails. There is
no question that it difficult for many people to come to the US, and
those who do are often subject to some pretty serious screening -- we
learned this in 2006. The other thing that we've learned in the last 8
years is that there are few to no countries that are as open as we
would like to visitors from all parts of the world. Some are more open
than others, but everywhere has problems. So we can make the "is the
country open?" criteria that we use more fine-grained; but I think the
answer is 90% of the time "it depends" and "for who?" (Look at, for
instance, the hugely varied responses on this thread.) But, you are
right that there is a gulf between "is it possible to enter?" and "it
is possible, but you'll probably be strip-searched for three hours and
have heaps of paperwork."

NB: it would be super if comments on the judging criteria could also
be put on the talk page for 2013:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2013/Judging_criteria
this will help the future jury as they review the criteria for next time.

I think as we plan we can take what we've learned and continue to
iterate best practice [visa support, etc]; in this area we should also
make more of an effort to learn from other seriously international
conferences. I would love to someday see our attendee list break the
100-country mark.

best,
phoebe