Talk:Wikimania/Scholarships/2013

Thanks for this beautiful report! –SJ talk 

Other interesting data

Additional facets of the data that would be interesting (From a wikimania-l discussion):

• # of recipients who attended Wikimania for the first time;
• # who received a travel scholarship for the first time;
• # who were active contributors, and to which [clusters of] projects. (possibly grouped by cluster to avoid individual identification, if that is needed)

–SJ talk  22:56, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Non-scholarship travel funding

Can we capture data on people who are paid by movement funds to attend Wikimania, outside of scholarships? These include, to my knowledge

• WMF trustees (combined with a quarterly board meeting)
• WMF committees: AffCom (at least last year: combined with one of two in-person meetings), other?
• WMF staff (ED historically gives a plenary; all staff get 1 free wikimania)
• WMF advisory board (on request. the one perk of being an advisor. usually ~2-5 per year)
• Chapter & Thematic org staff
• Chapter & Thematic org trustees

One thing that happens is: when an entity first sets a budget for itself, it starts to think about what it needs funds for.

Travel is a common first-budget line item. We should think about whether this is in line with the principles we want to develop.

There is a table for the last bullet points here: Wikimania_2013/Budget --CDG (talk) 10:00, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Anonymity vs. Transparency

What aspects of scholarships require anonymity? How much transparency can we offer into the process and the recipients?

For example: in 2006, the main scholarship recipients were all publicly listed, publicly honored (with a dinner just for them), and offered their own space to talk about their home projects. There were no complaints. (There may have been a few less public chapter-scholarships; back then this was not centrally coordinated.)

Benefits of anonymity:

• Increasese anonymity of attendees who don't want their attendance to be public at all.
• People who would be shy to admit that they received a scholarship (because it implies they couldn't afford to attend on their own? implies that they asked for support?) might apply where they otherwise would not

Benefits of transparency:

• Allows everyone to see the result of the selection process, and learn from it
• Allows other scholarship initiatives across the movement to make decisions informed by this outcome (for instance: efforts to reduce the total annual cost of participating in international events, for different highly active contributors)
• Removes a channel for conspiracy theories

–SJ talk  23:32, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

You already gave one reason. Imho that's enough for a project which strenghtens anonymity amongst its editors. If you don't want others letting to know when you've been at what place is another reason. Nevertheless, we should prefer transparency and only exempt it for good reasons. Cheers, —DerHexer (Talk) 19:02, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

I think that allowing anyone to opt out of transparency makes sense. Allowing people to opt in to transparency (for instance: asking them if it is ok) also makes sense. I think transparency should be the default, but would be glad to hear other views. –SJ talk  22:18, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

At WMAT we published the nicknames of our scholarship holders and asked them to report their experiences back to our community. It worked fine. --CDG (talk) 10:06, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

The spirit of "shouldn't pay out of pocket"

I've started to hear in the last few years people saying that certain community members "shouldn't have to pay out of pocket" to attend international events.

I'm not sure how healthy that perspective is when applied to a social conference where most attendees are paying out of pocket. It is a minor nit, but in combination with other small effects (those on an expense account tend to stay at more expensive hotels, and to eat more expensive meals) it leads to stratification of the attendees. This can possibly lead to stratification within the movement, and amplification of a sense of "us vs them" between staff and other editors, paid and volunteer developers, people who spend 100 hours on committees rather than 100 hours running essential scripts and bots. [I'm thinking of many volunteer communities here and ways that camraderie and unity can break down in the presence of unequal reimbursement; not just Wikimedia. we're doing well compared to many projects.]

Is there value in instituting a policy that encourages attendees to pay for some of the cost of attendance to a mainly-social event? Is this a reason to separate social from business meetings? Which movements manage to do this best? I don't know of a better place to start this discussion, so I'm doing it here, since the $200K that the movement expressly spends on scholarships is aimed at improving the texture of this one wonderful social event. –SJ talk  23:32, 13 January 2014 (UTC)