On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 4:35 PM, James Forrester jdforrester@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 6 Oct 2015 at 01:59 Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Did anyone do a calculation whether holding it in an expensive city (say, London) with cheaper flights actually /is/ cheaper than holding it in a cheap city in Asia (say, Delhi or Mumbai)? And then I don't mean WMF-budget wise, but total costs: including the costs by all affiliates, and the costs privately paid for by the volunteers. I recall being positively surprised that there was very little difference between India and Berlin for the chapters meeting...
pick of areas. For example, the additional cost to the community of hosting Wikimania in Australia is (very roughly) US$1k extra per person from outside Oceania compared to the base cost, and US$1k less for each person in Oceania. At typical levels of 800 non-local self-funded attendees, of whom we have around 10 from Oceania, and 400 local people who wouldn't otherwise come at all, This means an additional community cost of ~US$750k (and a bunch more for Wikimedia organisational funds, paid directly from WMF or via the chapters) in return for the opportunity for 400 local Oceanians to attend who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity.
Off the top of my head, the numbers are roughly comparable for Latin America (slightly less for Mexico), a bit lower for South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe/Russia/Central Asia, and lower still for Asia Pacific and the Middle East and North Africa. The numbers drift from year to year a bit, but sadly there's not much impact on the overall headline whilst the editing community is so unequally geographically distributed.
This is why we included the call to area to get into the practice of having annual regional or sub-regional conferences. These would let a much larger portion of our community more easily afford to come to an in-person community event to share their passion, talk about what we can do to improve the projects, and learn new things. This is what the Wikimedia conferences, be they the global Wikimania or the regional "Wikimeetings" (people should suggest a great name!), should be about.
that is an interesting way to see it. i checked flight prices from europe to america. in the same category around 400-600 usd are: san francisco, new york, washington, boston, chicago, orlando, miami, montreal, toronto, belo horizonte, brasilia, porto alegre, rio de janairo, sao paolo, natal, recife, goiana, fortaleza, macelo, manaos, sao luiz, vitoria, florianopolis. this would suggest that brazil is included together with canada and united states, don't you think?
if we want to change something i'd find it appropriate to put a little bit more thought into it. how much of the total 100 mio USD should be spent to "let the right person meet somebody else in person" would be the basic guiding principle. and all meetups would need to be part of that thought. to give a couple of examples which only involve wikimania:
option1 would be to let people apply and then choose the location according to a calculation to minimize total cost. this of course takes the tourist aspect out of wikimania :) you could go the FIFA way and let the orgainzing city pay wikimania.
option2 would be to increase the fun and tourist factor. then you have to go to every country once, so the next wikimania in the united states would be in the year 2170. so a person can have a lifetime achievement list "go to wikimania once".
option3 would be to classify participants. who are the persons we want to meet. persons fully in their professional life, who sell every hour to somebody, where time counts, who cannot afford to travel a little bit further to sleep cheaper. or persons who do not care so much about time, who travel further to sleep cheapter, who maybe have time to contribute to wikipedia. you then would look out for cheap medium attracting cities.
option4 is be to see it as marketing event for wikipedia contribution. one could only meet in countries where there are not so many wikimedians to allow a lot of persons with little idea about how wikipedia works to participate, and see. cities like accra, lagos, johannesburg, dehli, shanghai, etc.
option5 is to see it as source of income. then you could organize the event in easy to reach locations, and set a high price tag to attend.
option6 is to scrap the current format, as travelling 2000km to listen to a presentation is a last century concept. presentations would be encouraged to be done at home and shared via youtube/commons or whatever is technologically good. presentations are voted on, and wikimania might get a workshop format to discuss the presentations.
james, does it make sense to consider some of these options? i know this is nothing for next years wikimania, but for 2017.
best, rupert