Thanks Anass for bringing this up! It's a very frustrating situation for community members to deal with visas. It's also worth noting that in certain cases there are places that request a visa from certain countries, but do not have an Embassy in the country they are requesting the visa from -- meaning that a community member has to travel to another destination (sometimes significantly far away!) in order to get paper processed. That takes money and time.
To me, the big elephant in the room is the need to re-imagine how we can do better integration of in person / remote events. The challenge here is that in the upcoming future it won't make sense from a carbon budget & climate perspective to fly people around the world, and we need to start designing more real decentralized events, not only to expect that we'll be able to plug a video screen somewhere and have in-person meetings while people watch from the outside (which doesn't lead to real participation / interaction). Also, flights have gone up significantly -- plane tickets are double the amount that they were before the pandemic; this also will represent a challenge for conference organizers, because they will be able to fly even less people with the money allocated for the event. And also worth noting that from anyone outside of the US / Europe, flying to Europe takes *a lot of time*. How we are asking community members and volunteers to use their time it's a big part of the conversation about equity. Sorry to hear that the visa issue has prevented a community member to bring their perspective fully into the table. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/X2ZGHJMQ4HZ3LEJTQFZHVDJYX2YO6A7D/ To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
