Wikimania – can volunteers organize conferences?

Wikimania is the annual international Wikimedia conference. This is an annual international conference for Wikimedia contributors. About 1000 people convene for the three-day main conference, in which 5 conference tracks are ongoing for eight hours. Conference tracks cover such topics as presenting individuals’ projects, reviewing community organizing plans, promoting access to information sources, developing tutorial infrastructure, legal issues, software demonstrations, regional outreach, metrics reporting, and reviewing research. Before the main conference there is a two-day preconference, termed a hackathon, in which people meet in small groups for meetings, workshops, training, and more personal discussion. I went to the conference in DC in 2012, Hong Kong in 2013, London in 2014, and Mexico City in 2015.

An issue arose at the Mexico Conference. I only know gossip and not real insider details, but the facts are that the conference was supposed to be held at a the Vasconcelos Library but instead was held at the Hilton Hotel. Wikipedians love libraries and in the election process which chose Mexico as the host city, a major factor persuading the community to choose Mexico was the organizing team’s enthusiasm for the library. Two months before the conference happened the venue was changed from the public library to a Hilton Hotel. I did not notice the change announcement and was surprised closer to the event when I noticed that the location changed. Reasons cited for the change are inability to secure close enough hotels for attendees and uncertainty in the library’s wiki capacity. These things may be so, and perhaps the library was always an inappropriate choice of venue. Still – I regret that so many volunteers did so much work for about a year planning an event at this library only to suddenly change. How much volunteer work was expended in the original plan? Why was that venue not sooner identified as inappropriate? Considering that volunteers are supposed to organize things like venue location – was there some way that volunteer labor was insufficient to accomplish the task, and could the paid staff which did the emergency moving of the event have been diligent in the original assessment and saved volunteer time?

The situation is that the mythology around the Wikimedia movement is that volunteers do everything. In reality, paid staff do a lot and serve in the most essential roles. The mythology partly developed because from 2001-2008 definitely the Wikimedia Foundation and the community had almost no money, and no external organizations were funding Wikimedia contributors. Since about 2008 the situation has changed a lot, but there are few evaluations of the changes, and fewer publications about the changes still. From the Wikimedia Foundation perspective, their funding has gone from nothing in 2001 to USD 65+ million this year. I mention this is my “Value of a Wikipedian” post. Another change is that more organizations are willing to hire their own Wikipedians. I was the first person hired to do Wikipedia work full time indefinitely. It was a crazy concept when I was hired, most people would still say that it is a strange idea, but now at this point, a lot of organizations are doing it. Since I came to New York, I have come to realize that a lot of editing in television and movies is done by paid editors, and this is especially taboo. Still, on Wikipedia there is a lot of demand for good information on popular television shows, and people seem to appreciate Wikipedia’s coverage of this. The concept is so boring that except in the case of the most popular television shows no one would think to do this, but for many shows, there are enough fans to appreciate reading the content on Wikipedia if paid staff put it there. In a lot of ways, paid contributions are creeping into Wikipedia without there being any history of community discussion to address the implications of this.

I say this to give some context to what in any other nonprofit movement would be a non-issue. The Wikimania conference is imagined to be a community run event, but leaving a conference entirely to volunteers is too burdensome for the volunteers and too risky for the community movement. There is a community memory that in 2010 in Poland, the volunteers managing the Wikimania conference became overwhelmed. As the story goes, the Wikimedia Foundation stepped in and had staff take over some essential roles during the conference and hired local event coordinators to make it go well. In 2011 the conference in Israel went well because the Israeli chapter is known for good business sense, having an office with good fundraising and management practices, and otherwise being a volunteer organization with effective staff support. In 2012 the Wikimania coordinators in DC paid USD 30,000 to hire an event consultant, and the WMF granted that because “event consultant” is a role which was available for hire in the United States and because they actually managed finance, legal contracts, and event coordination while giving volunteers final sign-off on everything without having a cozy relationship to the volunteers. In 2013 the volunteers in Hong Kong got a lot criticism for not reporting the finances of the conference – see for example “Hong Kong’s Wikimania 2013—failure to produce financial statement raises questions of probity“. I know that Hong Kong did not hire an event planner in the way that one was hired for DC, and it is my opinion that if they had, and if their event planner had managed their accounting, then there would have been no community objection to their reporting of the event. Based on my incomplete information, had the Hong Kong team not depended on volunteers to do accounting – which is a tedious and time consuming task to suggest that any volunteer do – and instead asked for USD 30,000 for a consultant to produce the report and accounting, then they would have gotten the money and high praise for their management of the event, because I think it was the best managed Wikimania I have yet attended. They managed to have volunteers everywhere greeting everyone at so many parts of the process, and the volunteers collectively seemed to me like a trained army that was on the edge of all activity continually directing me into the experience they had designed and kept on a tight schedule. The London conference was great, but then also, the London Wikimedia chapter is the second-best funded after Germany and has about 10 staff. They also managed the conference in an expensive conference venue that required its own staff be funded to coordinate the event, in contrast to for example the DC and Hong Kong events in universities which depended heavily on volunteers to complement the few staff services and the complete Hilton services in Mexico.

In 2014 I helped to organize WikiConference USA in New York with other volunteers. Organizing conference programming is a fun activity for volunteers – doing event management was tedious. For us volunteers, we liked advertising the event in some channels, reviewing program submissions, soliciting for scholarship applications and reviewing them, and recruiting volunteers to be on hand for the day of the event. Some of the duties which we did not enjoy, and which we would have preferred to turn over to paid staff, include negotiating the event with the venue and caterers; managing the written agreements about finance and safety; coordinating a travel team to dispense money for scholarship recipients; the accounting; the metrics part of the grant reporting to the Wikimedia Foundation; comprehensive communication in the manner of communications professionals as opposed to the style of grassroots volunteers; and responding to harassment. We got a stalker during that event and it spoiled the mood of what happened. We managed the conference for about 30,000 because the venue was a school which donated what elsewhere we would have paid 60,000. About 10k of the 30 was the food and incidentals and the other 20k was scholarships. There were about 10 of us on the organizing team and I suppose we met in person about 30 hours each to plan the event plus maybe as much time alone doing things online. This was for a 3-day conference for about 3-500 people, I forget how many. Wikimania must be on the same scale.

Is it worth having volunteers spend their time in this way? The money is less of an object these days. Volunteer time is scarce, and anyone who would consider volunteering to convene a Wikimedia conference is likely to also be a person whose time could be spent where expertise is scarce, like actually presenting Wikimedia culture instead of only creating a space for others to do this. Professional event coordinators are at least 2-3x more efficient in organizing events than a volunteer team would be, and also will anticipate bureaucratic reporting standards intuitively when volunteers might not anticipate the need at all.

I was thinking – until now, Wikimania conferences have been held based on an Olympic style bidding process in which groups of volunteers in different cities around the world bid for the right to host the conference. The outcome of the bid is that they get something like USD 300,000 to host the conference, with more money coming for special needs on request and constituting maybe 100,000 more. The restriction is that volunteers are discouraged from hiring paid staff to present the conference, and the event is expected to be as volunteer run as possible. I wonder if it might happen that the Wikimedia Foundation sees a history of difficulty, and is thinking of squashing the idea that volunteers should present conferences. I have never heard anyone suggest this but I have heard from volunteer organizers how much work it is, and I have my own experience especially with WikiConference 2014 but also with other conferences I know the work involved and the inefficiency that volunteers experience in doing things that professionals do easily. I think it would be more reasonable for the Wikimedia Foundation to hire event staff to manage almost all parts of the event, if only to free the volunteers’ time to do more personal engagement. A local Wikipedia team should coordinate some hospitality functions, like staffing the registration desk, having volunteers around to answer questions about the neighborhood, in selecting the keynote speakers and scheduling programming, and in recruiting Wikipedians to participate. Historically an online volunteer committee has selected the program submissions to be featured and also chosen scholarship recipients. I want these things continued, but as for event coordination – paid staff in the Western World / United States tradition ought to be used.

I worry about two side issues.

One is that the Hilton Hotel is an expensive American hotel with horrible business ethics. They charge about USD $300 a night for rooms, so for the ~100 scholarship recipients and the ~100 Wikimedia Foundation staff who attended the conference, this was about the rate paid for 5 nights. USD 300 * 200 people * 5 nights is USD 300,000, which is the typical conference scale and probably about the price including venue space, catering, and the negotiation of rate. It bothers me that this money went to an American company and not a local business. It also bothers me that this rate is so far removed from the local economy. A recent economic report says 46% of people in Mexico made less than USD 157 in a month, so one night in this hotel costs about 2 months wages in the local rate. In Mexico City where the conference was held, the report says 76% of people make USD 157 or less. How did the local Wikipedia contributors feel about hosting a conference in a venue so far removed from local culture and norms? How would the international guests have felt to stay in a local hotel instead of an American one?

The other issue is that almost all of the conference presentations were showcasing the work of paid staff when many people think that the Wikimedia movement is a volunteer initiative. There were five days of conference. The first two days were hackathon days, in which staff at the Wikimedia Foundation control everything that goes on the schedule. This is the first year that happened, because in previous years I made posts to the hackathon without a problem but this year my posts were not allowed. There were lots of empty rooms reserved, and people could meet during the first two days, and scholarship recipients were present, but only posting to the schedule was prohibited. In the other three days of the conference, I count 150 talks. Among these, 48 talks were presentations including paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation did not participate in Spanish language talks, of which there were 26, so 48/124 makes 39% of the talks to be paid presentations by Wikimedia Foundation staff. 50 of the English language talks were done by people who were paid to present by some organization other than the WMF (including staff of chapters or paid Wikipedians like me), so that really just leaves 26 talks or about 16% done in English by volunteers this year. This 16% is for the three days available to the community, and not the two hackathon days where programming was managed by WMF staff. I expect that I could have counted incorrectly about the paid talks, because maybe I neglected to identify someone as being paid and counted them as volunteers.

I would have preferred that the Wikimedia volunteer community fill most of the speaking slots, perhaps 66% of them, with anyone who is paid to present having a lesser allotment. I want to emphasize volunteers, because the community and the Wikimedia Foundation put so much emphasis on volunteer contributions and say that the Wikimedia movement is volunteer driven. I think there is a perception even in the Wikimedia community that the community speaks for itself, but somehow this year the Wikimedia community was the audience at its own conference. For future Wikimanias I might like all talks tagged as volunteer presented, WMF presented, and paid staff contributed.

I am grateful to the volunteers who contributed to put this conference on, because I specifically sought ought talks by volunteers.