Hello, One point on 2018 scholarships: in 2017, a non-negligible number of Wikimedians (something between 10 and 20 I think) did not get Canadian visas. WMF decided to automatically grant them 2018 scholarships, basically re-using their scholarship budget. Removing this outlier, we should be consistently at 110-120 scholarships per year since 2014 which makes sense.
On the main point of this discussion, 275 USD starts to be somewhat prohibiting. Personally in my case I had to fill in in a hurry as I absolutely wanted not to pay extra 100 USD for nothing. Yes, this is not that much expensive compared to professional conferences that are usually starting from 1000 USD, but this is mainly a volunteer conference, and we are paying with our own money. I would honestly be interested to know how this sum is spread between different budget lines. How much is spent on the venue, how much on lunches, how much on parties etc. For instance, I might have wanted not to pay for the party if it is worth over 100 USD, or not to pay for lunches if they are at 30 USD etc... Best regards, Mykola (NickK) --- Оригінальне повідомлення --- Від кого: "Tisza Gergő" <[email protected]> Дата: 1 червня 2019, 14:41:14 On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 1:12 PM effe iets anders <[email protected]> wrote: I would even argue that for by far most people, the registration cost will not be the limiting factor - other components of the trip would likely be (unless they are local to Stockholm, maybe). The travel to Stockholm alone will outweigh this fee by a factor of 2, maybe 4 for most, and a week of accommodation with the remaining dinners will probably set you back at least the same amount (if you go very low budget). Those estimates are way off. Most of our volunteer base is in Europe, where flight costs are typically below $100; you can find accomodation in the immediate vicinity of the conference for $200 (and you can probably go way cheaper with hostels, or by being in a more distant part of the city); if you actually want to go very low budget and skip on restaurants / pubs / etc, food costs are minimal (and obviously people do need to eat outside of Stockholm as well, so it's not really an extra spending). So the conference fee would be about half of your total costs. There are two ways that our movement can try to address this hurdle: one way would be to reduce the price even further for everyone, the other is to provide help for some people to overcome all these financial hurdles. I personally prefer that we spend more on scholarships (travel, accommodation and registration) rather than even further subsidizing the registration fee for all other participants. So are we actually spending more on scholarships? There is no consistent reporting on scholarships (nor any other aspect of Wikimania for that matter) but some wiki archeology gives: - 2012: 87 full + 47 partial per [1] - 2013: 62 full + 18 partial (which apparently somehow adds up to 86...) per [2] - 2014: 109 per [3] - 2015: 110 per [4] - 2016: 88 full + 35 partial + 6 additional (whatever that means) per [5] ([6] claims 99 full) - 2017: 81 full + 17 partial per [5] - 2018: 125 full + 16 partial per [5] - 2019: 96 full + 20 partial per [5] So it seems like the higher price of the conference was indeed offset somewhat by a slightly higher number of scholarships in 2018, but that is not the case for 2019. (Granted this is WMF only, and a significant part of scholarships tend to come from affiliates, but it's even harder to find data on that.) [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/Scholarships/2012 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/Scholarships/2013 [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Wikimania_scholars/2014 [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Wikimania_scholars/2015 [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Wikimania_scholars#2019_WMF_Wikimania_Scholarships [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/Scholarships/2016 _______________________________________________ Wikimania-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
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