On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 03:39, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am wondering whether, for the purposes of (1) increasing the cost > effectiveness of travel expenses, (2) reducing the negative environmental > effects from travel, and (3) increasing the number of chairpersons who > participate, if future meetings could be scheduled immediately before or > after Wikimania or the Wikimedia (WMF + Affiliates) Summit.
This is already being done to a large extent. For example, lots of team offsites are scheduled to run either before or after the annual all staff meeting, hackathons, Wikimania, etc, which wasn't really the case a few years back. The effects of this policy can be seen in the annual financial statements—in FY2013/14 and FY2017/8 the amount spent on travel and conferences was almost exactly the same [1] in spite of the Foundation having grown by around 100 staff [2]. As to whether more bundling of meetings with other meetings should be done, I find it to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, travel spending is reduced, and it's more likely that people can attend meetings due to bundling things together. On the other hand, the effectiveness of the meetings is reduced; conferences like Wikimania are exhausting enough without having to do important meetings that require a lot of concentration either before or afterwards. Whether that trade-off is worth it or not depends on the situation. It's certainly not as clear cut as you make it out to be here. With regards to environmental impact, I always recommend the "green stuff" thread <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/051656.html>. Dan [1]: Source: Wikimedia Foundation financial reports <https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/>. In FY2013/14 there was a total of $1,965,854 spent on travel and conferences, and in FY2017/18 the same spending was $1,954,772. Travel spending fluctuated up by around 17% in the years between these, but it went back down afterwards. Travel spending has remained basically the same despite significant growth of the organisation, demonstrating the effectiveness of policy changes on decreasing travel spending. [2]: Source: my memory. An exact figure could probably be figured out by looking at the history of the staff and contractors page on foundation.wikimedia.org. _______________________________________________ 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: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
