This probably goes too far of this thread, but judging from another thread where attendance complain that no C-level WMF executive attended the French language conference, people expect from Wikimania not so much the talks (which I guess by now are available online anyway), but a chance of meeting some people and discussing issues which can not be discussed online - this is what Dutch call "wandelgangcultuur". In this sense, the live attendance is not at all the same as the online attendance.
Cheers Yaroslav On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 1:36 PM Fæ <[email protected]> wrote: > We used to regularly raise the issue of a lack of active > videoconferencing at Wikimania. Though we (Wikimedians) are highly > technically literate, we still do not host virtual attendees, such as > 3D virtual conferencing and claim it a win if we release video streams > of some of the presentations. > > Both to reduce our community's carbon footprint, and to encourage > access for those that find air travel challenging or impossible, it > would be great to see the Wikimedia Foundation being active in > trialing and funding virtual environments for our events. 25 years ago > I worked for a global bank and had regular virtual meetings in a video > room where you physically sat at a conference table where the other > half telemagically was in other headquarters in other cities with > shared (physical) whiteboards to help workshopping. These days it's > relatively easy to videoconference, but we should do more to > experiment with whether booking video suites in different cities might > also be a good way of encouraging Wikimedians to default to local > travel and still be active in our multi-national or global events and > workshops. At the end of the day, paying a few hundred dollars for > several conference suites or higher end conference kit hire hosted by > local Wikimedia Chapters, is a fraction the cost of paying for a far > smaller number of lucky applicants to get their flights and > accommodation paid for. > > This type of high quality conferencing initiative would perfectly fit > the non-specific high level aims mentioned in the WMF sustainability > documents. It's weird to me that this is still a debate, and folks are > defending continued air travel at the current consumption levels, > rather than even trialling all the virtual alternatives. > > Fae > > On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 at 12:14, Ilario Valdelli <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Anyways this is perceived by the community. > > > > In Wikimedia CH we cannot give scholarships for Wikimania because people > > would not do long trips. > > > > IMHO the problem is these big events. > > > > For this reason we prefer to give more scholarships for regional wikicon > > than to Wikimania. > > > > This is the reason why you dont see more Swiss people at Wikimania. > > > > Kind regards > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
