On Saturday 14 March I and some others met in DC to plan WikiConference 2015. I was an organizer for the event last year. It was covered a bit in external media. We organizers had met perhaps 10 times in person and done more organizing online to run a three-day conference in Manhattan for 250 people on about 12,000 cash, with an extra 22,000 for scholarships to get national participation from a more diverse participation base. Note that these budgets are very small, and a typical budget for a volunteer conference like this in the location where we presented ought not be less than 120,000 for operations. A huge in-kind donation worth not less than 80,000 in rental fees came from New York Law School, which provided the space and gave us student rates on catering, thanks to Jennifer Baek of the Free Culture Foundation, Right to Research Coalition, Wikimedia NYC, a lot of other access-to-information projects, and now working for the New York City government as some kind of legal adviser. All of us organizers contributed a lot but Jenn both had the social connections and the event management experience and volunteer time to be a driving force behind the conference. I was fortunate among the others in that I had encouragement from Consumer Reports to spend some staff time organizing and presenting the conference, as well as a little money to contribute from my organization.
I will always remember and be grateful for Jenn’s contribution and it was a pleasure working with someone who is so effective as she is. I understand entirely that her intent was to set a model and send the conference on its way, and she could not continue to manage the event especially as a volunteer and with all the stress associated with it. We ended up with a stalker at the event who particularly targeted the females among us, but who also doxxed everyone involved and tried to incite disparagement campaigns against everyone, presumably because of an ongoing campaign this person has against the Wikimedia mission. Who knows why people go off the deep end of sanity and lose their ability to share human respect with others, but none of us involved could really understand why we were targeted with so much hate. Harassment is not uncommon in any community organization, and all projects which get public attention run the risk of attracting an angry troubled person long term. I try to avoid people who themselves seek to avoid all reconciliation or appeasement. Definitely seeing my friends and colleagues harassed was the worst part of the experience for me, and the targeting over gender was especially creepy. The emotional cost to volunteers who tried to organize this conference was significant and there was a lot of crying, nervousness, and fear because of the stalker, and even shouting and infighting among people about the best course of action to protect the safety of the volunteers. We lost at least one volunteer contributor because of the stalking, and the person who stepped away could not have their contributions replaced equally if we had budget to hire a full time staff person perpetually. I still hope for reconciliation of everyone to the Wikimedia project over this, but definitely threatening people’s safety, personal lives, careers, and sexuality costs a lot for the victims. I hope if I see this kind of situation again that I am more conscious of what to do correctly and quickly in response. There really are not so many dangerous stalkers in the world but it is difficult to have an interaction with one.
None of the people who organized the last event wanted to contribute the time to do the same thing again without support. A major deterrent is the risk of being stalked and harassed again while also managing other affairs. Another deterrent was that we felt that our strength was in being volunteers who did conference planning and programming, and not in trying to emulate event coordination professionals who could negotiate venue, order catering, plan for staff facilities support, and do accounting. Another problem which could be on volunteers or staff is event impact reporting, which could include tracking demographics of attendees, their interests, satisfaction with the event, and the outcomes of the event. I argue that impact reporting also should be done by paid professional staff.
For the 2015 event it seems that the Wiki Educational Foundation is happy to use its staff to manage many aspects of the conference. The breakdown is that community volunteers review submissions, plan the schedule, invite the keynote speakers, grade scholarship applications, and volunteer as community helpers on the day of the event, while most of the work that can be done by paid staff will be done by staff of the wiki Education Foundation. That organization benefits from this event because as the volunteer community in the United States and Canada develops, so does its capacity to do outreach to universities. I think the volunteer community benefits from this partnership both by the relief of event management and by the advancement of Wiki Ed’s mission.
The conference is not certain yet and may not happen at all, but we discussed what we wanted to happen, what we wished to avoid, what roles people would take, how this could be financed, and other logistics. I am continuing the conversation and hope that we can find a way to make this work.