I am happy to have been among the organizers for the October 2016 WikiConference North America. I had previously helped to organize the conference in New York and another in DC. It is nice that attendees of the previous conferences and the general Wikipedia community appreciated those conferences enough to give more support for continuing the conference as an annual event.
The conference is wiki-themed and the process of organizing it as a national, annual conference has had a major impact on how we Wikipedia organizers in the United States relate to each other. Because hosting a regional conference requires support from stakeholders throughout the region, more Wikipedia community organizers in North America have spent more time in discussion with each other to present this conference than they have for any other single purpose. It is good that the community has organized this conference and it has built closer relationships for efficient collaboration, resource exchange, and personal relationships. A drawback of the event is that it has demanded the attention and time of some of the most talented Wikipedia contributors. There is an opportunity cost of having the Wikipedia community’s best organizers focus their attention on matters of routine labor rather than Wikimedia-specific projects, but since the community operates at almost zero budget, the only way to make the conference happen is to have the best people give their attention to the mundane details of organization.
The first conference in 2014 was led by Jenn of the former “Students for Free Culture”, later renamed to Free Culture Foundation. That organization had grown to require more management and be less efficient than when it was smaller, and she wanted to move the support for their conference into a community with more organizer capacity. The longest-serving supporters of Wikipedia, the Free Culture Foundation, and similar groups are not brand-loyal to their home projects. Instead, the mood of the time was to have great respect for free culture groups, Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, Mozilla, OpenStreetMap, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all the free software organizations, and any sort of STEM or GLAM or governmental knowledge sharing organization. We all had Wikipedia in common and rallied around that, but at the same time, the Wikipedia community was not nearly as developed as its allied activist communities and it was never certain that Wikipedians alone would be able to manage a conference. It was also not certain that the public would attend a Wikipedia-themed conference.
In 2014 we had anticipated Wikimedia Foundation support for the conference and they did provide a grant. Overall, working with the Wikimedia Foundation led many of us to feel second-class. The WMF was really nice – they provided about USD $13k for the conference and $22k for scholarships. We could not have hosted the conference without the faith that they had in us. Still, I had the feeling that they had mixed feelings about supporting the conference with funding because of our use of the Wikipedia name. In a lot of ways, the WMF can be like a faceless machination rather than a peer to the community groups, just because their spokespeople, policies, agreements, priorities, and posture to community affairs change so frequently. If WMF staff did feel that WikiConference was a liability, then their worries were justified. We Wikipedians were presenting the Wikimedia brand broadly in New York, which is an international stage, and together we were taking on risks to the public image of Wikipedia without having the resources to address problems which might have arisen. Part of the tension in the relationship between Wikipedia volunteers and the Wikimedia Foundation is that Wikimedia community members are able present conferences and other public spectacles at will without permission from any central authority. The major point of control which the WMF has over the conference are the peer-to-peer negotiations that it has with organizers and the granting of funding itself. If the community had not gotten funding from the WMF, then it might have gotten funding elsewhere, which could have been an even more risky situation for the WMF. For most nonprofit organizations with chapter systems, it is presumed that headquarters has control over how the chapters use the international brand. The Wikipedia’s community’s founding principle of “anyone can do anything in this project” is one strange way that wiki conference planning differs from a national conference of almost any other nonprofit brand. If the WMF had not funded the conference, and if the community had presented one anyway, and if anything had gone wrong with it, the liability would have gone to the international image of Wikipedia and Wikimedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation would have had to clean the mess. It sometimes seems like the Wikimedia Foundation would prefer to get on with its business without ever having to regard the community in its platform, and counter to that the Wikimedia community regards the entirety of the Wikimedia Foundation’s budget as its own with WMF staff as mediators for facilitating community discussion of how it should be managed. The ongoing trend is that the WMF provides more support for community issues over time, and in return, the Wikimedia community casually postpones conversation about who can rightfully control donor money.
In the background of many public wiki events there is also a scandal. All communities like scandals, and any given online community of Wikipedia’s size will have a continuous appetite to notice and discuss 1-2 scandals at any time. When one passes then another suitable scandal is identified for development and adaptation to discussion cycle. In a typical scandal, the community identifies something which the WMF has done and declares it to be outrageous and anti-wiki. Perhaps the behavior is anti-wiki or perhaps not; the community keeps scandals brewing in a pot on the backburner and lets them boil over whenever it seems like it is time for attention. Typical scandals might be enacting a bold software change or risky social innovation without stakeholder support, or by having some individual in WMF’s upper ranks come to attention for old-fashioned scandalous behavior. Usually when WMF staff make wild changes, those changes work and are a great success and no one notices, because software is supposed to be effortlessly invisible and social campaigns by big organizations are also. Perhaps 90% of wild changes get no attention. When there is a problem, then that is an opportunity for a user revolt, and the WMF gets social pressure to respond to the revolt with some concession for good will. Community groups are part of this cycle of aggression and penance, because if they are bystanders then they can receive reparations for harm done elsewhere in exchange for recognizing the WMF. It is an odd system in Internet culture and not unique to Wikipedia. Online communities tend to do this with their platform hosts when possible. Whatever contemporary or popular scandals were ongoing at the time could have affected WMF or Wikimedia community posturing toward our Wikiconference, because so many decisions rely on whom is asked and how they feel that day. It is hard to say how strong feelings affect anyone. Scandals of the time were the usual – software and social issues, and are more significant to consider as a factor in relations than because of the scandals being inherently interesting or relevant. The emotions of individuals are more influential in wiki-planning than any centralized outreach strategy. Looking back, I do not recall which tension between the WMF and the community was in play during conference planning, but as a rule, all major Wikipedia events everywhere in the world have a drama in the background which emotionally charges many of the organizers and keeps WMF staff alert. The continual development of the Wikimedia Foundation grants program has been an effort to make hosting these events a more neutral and objective process, and I appreciate this trend because more routine would be an improvement.
If in 2014 we had not been able to secure a venue for 300 people for free in Manhattan then the conference would not have happened. Local hero Wikipedian Jenn was 90% responsible for that because the venue was her own New York Law School and she put in a huge amount of time negotiating the space. The other 10% of effort was people providing Jenn with document or social support, but she managed herself in a big way. The space for that time would have rented for 40-80k for our purpose but that was donated by the law school. I am not from NYC, but since I came here, I have noticed that it is customary to make up absurd prices related to the cost of real estate or venue rentals, and it seems like sometimes when someone asks for huge joke rates they still people pay sometimes. I have no idea what venue space actually is worth here because it seems like some groups pay anything, while somehow other groups get offers for donations supposed to be valued at huge sums. Whatever the value, Jenn was a miracle worker, and we could not afford to pay anything. Looking back I am even more grateful for what she gave just because it already seems that the conference went forward in years 2 and 3 based largely on what she proved in year 1. I could also give credit to the Free Culture Foundation for having hosted conferences in previous years, because the Wikipedia conference built from the social infrastructure of that conference and meetup series.
From one perspective it was great that the Wikimedia Foundation provided grant support for the conference. From another perspective, the low amount they granted and bureaucratic demands on it made the volunteers feel underappreciated. The prevailing advice around wiki-funding in the United States had been that Wikipedia community volunteers should never do independent fundraising until their need became greater than 200k a year. To 2014, I think that all wiki communities in the United States together were getting less than 50k a year combined from the WMF, with the groups in DC and NYC taking the most. There was a taboo on having regular paid staff, so even though the communities discussed re-negotiating for funding to cover 10 hours / month administrative work, the WMF advised to instead request more money for programming done by volunteers. The WMF’s perspective of the time, as discussed by wiki community members, was that the community should request lots of more money for programs up to 200k a year and after that time there could be talk of hiring administrative staff. Looking back, I now have a better understanding how much volunteer time it takes to do wiki community management and programming and realize that staff at WMF had zero volunteer management experience and were fabricating rules and expectations without understanding of how much work it would take to meet some of the requests they made for bureaucracy and reporting. For example, many staffmembers at the WMF spread the rumor for years that if Wikipedia volunteers organized a community event, then with a small amount of time and no particular training any volunteer could document and report the event similar to how a grant writing professional would. In reality, the WMF wanted reports that could only be created with more labor than any volunteer anywhere in the world in any wiki group wanted to give. An example is that 5 hours of administrative work would be needed to report a 5-hour event, which is excessive considering that typical Wikipedia meetups are research and writing groups of the sort that college students might organize over coffee. It is easy to spend a five-hour afternoon with friends over coffee, and learn and write at the same time, but absurd to dissect that experience into a business meeting report for a bureaucracy. It was a revelation discovered over time that until 2015 or later there was no publicly recognized example of a volunteer team in compliance with WMF reporting requests. Everyone was failing and feeling bad for the shortcoming, but as people started realizing that everyone was failing, it seemed more like the reporting demands were too complicated. Somehow, I am not sure how, I and other community members made promises to do event reporting and we consistently failed do produce what we said that we would. Nonprofit administration is not a trivial skill that anyone can do, and event documentation is something that takes hours and not something to be done in a few minutes during the event wrap-up. It was against staggering challenges that the WikiConference in New York happened entirely with volunteers. All of the main organizers were of New York City’s professional class and highly efficient and still it was difficult. There must have been 10 in-person meetings of 10 people that lasted 4 hours each, and countless other mini-meetings in person and online in video conferences with subcommittees of the conference or other volunteers managing one task without being part of the planning committee. I have trouble thinking back – did 600 hours of planning go into this 2014 conference? 1000? Is 1200 the right number considering the contributors on the periphery? If time is worth $20/hour then the conference had a huge volunteer donation of time. 20/hour is less than the average pay of the organizers and the total time investment in this would have been much less to just hire an event coordinator to do things professionally in a small amount of time. At least now the volunteers proved that they cared a lot, and the WMF observes these sorts of time sacrifices as supporting evidence of worthiness for future support. What a crazy system and expectations on both sides.
The 2014 conference in New York itself attracted 200-300 attendees. We estimated that one-third attended one day, one-third attended two days, and one-third attended all three days. If 200 people spent 8 hours at the conference, then the conference attracted 1600 participation hours just during the conference. I think that is a conservative estimate for how much time people spent in that year. Conference programming and after-events made two of the days 12-hour events. The conference impact itself had a greater impact because of all the infrastructure which was created to put it together and follow up after its close. Right now, the Wikimedia Foundation never talks about engagement hours as a success metric, but I was impressed with the interest the conference attracted. Wiki conferences are more participatory as compared to more traditional academic or professional conferences, just because wiki culture itself emphasizes collaboration and self-reliance in an uncommon way. I was personally gratified by hearing attendees speak of the profound impact that attending the conference had on them. For the past 10 years or so, I have probably attended an average of one conference a month, and I think wiki conferences tend to be high-positivity, high-impact experiences for both new and experienced attendees.
I was pleased to see so many staff from the Wikimedia Foundation fly from San Francisco to New York to attend the conference, but at the same time, it was a bit intimidating to have them around. Suppose they are paid an average of $40/hour for 8 hours, and they spent 3 days plus a travel day to attend. Maybe that means from their pay, the Wikimedia Foundation allotted 40*8*4=$1280 for staff salary hours per staff person to attend the conference, plus at least $500 for a flight and minimum 450 (150/night) for hotels. 1280+500+450=~$2200 per staff person to attend. Their attendance was in the context of being outsiders who had some prohibitions on interacting with Wiki contributors. When the entire conference budget was so low and we cut so many corners and invested so many volunteer hours to save on WMF money, why were so many WMF staff members there to observe us at such a dear cost? It felt like there was a great budget for observation and oversight, but a much smaller budget to actually provide a conference. The staff made no labor contributions to organizing the conference – labor was done by volunteers with support of a grant. I think that it fair to say that the WMF invested more in sending people to the conference than sponsoring the conference. None of us conference organizers anticipated that, and it was a shock to have had WMF discussions over minor expenses, and upon seeing that there was budget for WMF staff to attend, it became more apparent that the previous negotiations about minor budget items were an exercise in social exchange and never were about the money. Perhaps that is how this sector operates, and perhaps the conference was a liability to be managed. There is not a general feeling in the wiki community that staff at the WMF are wiki experts, and instead, the expertise is presumed to exist in the community with staff themselves typically needing to be taught by the community when they need to know something. I know that is a strange dynamic, because in a traditional nonprofit organization, the experts on the organization are typically in the organization, whereas in wiki that is rarely the case. The WMF may have more expertise on Wikimedia projects than any other single organization, but they will always have a small amount of understanding as compared to the sum of what is in the Wikimedia community. Another weird part of this is that some people in the WMF actually seem to be anti-WMF conspirators, or are actually the volunteers’ own moles who are fomenting resistance and Wikimedia community support in the midst of all these interactions. The barriers to communication exist in many directions.
I talked in a previous post about volunteer management of the larger international Wikimania conference. In that post, I talked about how I worried about paid professionals have the resources to engage more competitively in seeking choice and valuable schedule time than volunteers, and as a result, paid professionals and their interests are overrepresented in Wikipedia volunteer conferences. That happened a little in 2014, more in 2015, and more still in 2016. A way to measure this would be to count the number of paid presenters on the schedule, as I did in that previous post. Every time a WMF staffer gets a presentation slot at the conference there is a reason for that, and there is some social narrative that could explain each case. The problem with this system is that as a result, the conference is a little less authentic, because it is a little less controlled by the volunteer community, and the relationship between getting base funding for the conference and doing favors for individuals at the WMF becomes a little more real. Wikipedia as a project was imagined as including the WMF and the Wikimedia community on somewhat equal setting, with the WMF supporting the community, but since each WMF project needs community support to be funded, that means that WMF staffers are dependent on community favor and have to curry it through strategies like making conference presentations. I want the WMF staff at the conference, but I worry at the relationship between the funding for the conference and the inclusion of staff projects in the programming. If base funding were stable, then I think there would be less potential for WMF influence in the programming and the community could be more free.
One of the biggest stresses about the 2014 conference was harassment. Organizers of the conference were targets of harassment by Wikipedia’s critics for impersonal reasons. I am not entirely sure why trolls targeted the conference. There were some complaints about some aspects of the conference, but the complaints had nothing to do with the organizers and the organizers did not understand the complaints because they originated in some other issue. I never had a good understanding of any of the complaints. Regardless, somehow either a single troll or perhaps a troll army targeted conference organizers in a scary and disturbing way. I do not think anyone ever figured out what the harassment was about, except for general wiki criticism. We were all confused and did not even know what was trolling and what was coincidence, but many of the organizers experienced some weird online negativity from several directions by hostile-sounding online anonymous voices. Even at the conference the venue was vandalized, which was a bit scary because it was supporting evidence that an anonymous hostile actor was among attendees. None of us organizers ever sat down to discuss the harassment with each other. We tried, once after the conference, but the meeting lasted 10 minutes before the crying and screaming started just like in other times when harassment is addressed. These kinds of conversations need to be fielded by someone with training because empathetic highly polite people cannot communicate effectively with each other on the topic of harassment without trained mediation, and anyone coming into the discussion with more emotional charge makes the situation even less manageable.
After the conference Wil Sinclair, partner of then WMF director Lila Tretikov, began a protest against our WikiConference. He started a change.org petition protesting the conference for a conference ban that was made. The significance of this was that Wil’s protest was an existential threat to the future of the conference, because the conference was already challenged enough and having him disparage it could have meant a doomed reputation for the conference or its organizers. We all had to talk about this for hours and question our actions and what affect his criticism could have on a personal lives, our professions, and our longer term relationship with Wikipedia. I suggested that we as volunteers make him privy to all information relevant to his protest and let him take charge of changing whatever he wanted changed from his protest. WMF advice directed us to not engage with him. In hindsight I think it would have been interesting to let him make decisions about who to ban, because he seemed more willing to be at the center of attention than we were. I think that if he ever came back to the wiki community and wanted to be the trusted judge for deciding bans then I think anyone would let him, because the biggest challenge has been finding anyone of stature to take responsibility for banning decisions and not to actually make the decisions themselves. From my perspective, I wanted a Wikipedia conference to happen annually in the US, and there was no need for this community conference to become involved in the WMF’s own broader politics. Having the director’s partner criticize the conference was another draw of community volunteer attention into the tangle of interests at the WMF. Wil, so far as I know, never contacted any of the conference organizers, and when his protest was active we turned it over to his WMF minders to manage since he was more theirs than ours and since they were already managing his actions. It would have been great to get someone of his high community esteem to bring something positive to conference organizing. I am not sure what I learned from this experience or what to make of it. None of us conference organizers had any particular interest in any of the issues related to any bans or any broader Wikimedia Foundation criticism. It was a bizarre experience to get weird criticism from trolls beyond the usual weird criticism, somehow ban people from the event, negotiate for funding, get direct criticism from the partner of the top person at the organization providing the funding, then go back to routine local issues. Our group in New York could organize a conference, but we had the self-image of a group which meets in an artists’ workshop on a marginal budget and coordinated with significant contributions by people outside the work force either for being retired, students, or between jobs. To be put down by someone in our field from a household paid in the 100s of thousands of dollars with donor money from the community we were serving seemed so misguided as to be a mistake. It was scary to be at the receiving end of that. Might we all be kicked out of the Wikipedia community? Why was Wil so upset, and why does no one in the Wikimedia Foundation help mediate this, and why do so many people treat us as if we are supposed to be better managed with no paid staff than the Wikimedia Foundation is with hundreds of paid staff? I have no idea what Wil was doing, and can only guess that he misunderstood something and perhaps failed to understand that we as volunteers did not have lawyers on retainer to assist us with complicated issues in the way that people at the WMF did. He might have also expected us to have access to WMF institutional support, including staff to counsel us or help with the labor. In March 2016 Lila Tretikov was kicked out of the Wikimedia Foundation top position by a wave of community protests for continuous conflicts with the community. Wil’s protest against volunteers who organized the WikiConference was not publicly discussed around the time of her dismissal, but that was one of a series of events remembered when Lila’s continued office was considered. I suppose his protest of the conference is resolved, and I suppose the resolution is that neither he nor the WMF nor the community will ever have a conversation about what happened or why. I regret not being able to have a conversation with him because obviously he is a talented and well meaning person. As a prominent, high-ranking figure, I wish that he could have recognized the power differential in the relationship because I feel like he was unaware of how vulnerable we were as organizers and how much we could have used help from someone like him.
I resent that the Wikimedia Foundation waited so long to acknowledge harassment, but in their defense, no other organization would have done better. I cannot with confidence say that I expected them to do anything more for us, except to perhaps help us community organizers to have a more stable conference in general. I know, because I talked with enough other organizations to be confident that no one knows how to address online harassment of the sort that happens in large online aggregated communities. I hope to write more about wiki-harassment another time. I do not blame the WMF, because expertise does not currently exist in the world to present best practices for addressing online harassment. Whatever they did was the best ideas that anyone in the world had on the matter. At the same time, the WMF has a conflict of interest against acknowledging harassment and protecting wiki community members. The thought at the time was that wiki community members should support each other, and not expect Wikimedia Foundation support. Looking back, I can see that if the WMF acknowledged the problem, then they would also have to acknowledge responsibility and consequently do something to address it. Since it is not to the WMF’s benefit to assume an expensive liability for which any action they take toward justice will likely result in more harm to all involved as compared to doing nothing, I can understand why so many people at the WMF did not want to acknowledge harassment. At the same time, the WMF should have been more sympathetic in arranging victim support in some quiet way. It would have been a way to mitigate damage to the community. I know now that it is necessary to advocate more strongly for volunteer support when volunteers are attacked to discourage them from engaging in routine volunteer activities that have no relation to the source of the harassment. Participating in routine nonprofit activities, like planning a simple volunteer function like greeting people at the door of a nonprofit conference, should not make a person a target for harassment. I feel like the source of the harassment was a complaint against Wikipedia itself for whatever reason, and volunteers in our conference were targeted just because volunteers are more vulnerable than paid staff at the Wikimedia Foundation who were likely the real targets of the attack. Whatever the case – our wiki community managed itself the best that it could and the word at the time from the WMF was that harassment of volunteers was not its problem. That still is mostly the WMF policy, although I think things will change when more support infrastructure is created. I will say repeatedly that among all online communities, the WMF handles online harassment more effectively and than any other for its size. The WMF is the world’s authority on peace relations for online communities and addressing harassment resulting from online engagement, and whatever problems exist, everyone should expect that they get the fullest investment from the best minds for prevention and resolution. I am not aware of anyone having better ideas which are not being considered.
After the NYC conference the organizers got criticism from the WMF. The WMF wanted a grant report including conference metrics with certain information, and the information we were able to provide them did not meet their needs. The general public imagines that in the field of grantmaking, foundations award funding in exchange for advancing some nonprofit mission. This is sort of correct, but inside the nonprofit world, most workers are preoccupied with correalated metrics. In the case of the New York conference, I would call the event a success because for a low cash price the organizers secured an in-kind donation of an expensive venue, staffed the event with volunteers, and attracted a lot of attendees for a full event over three days. A large number of people had a perspective-changing experience at the event and many attendees went on to become super-activists with this conference being the inciting event. Maybe as volunteers we just did not have the professional skills to provide the kind of event reporting that the WMF wanted, but after the conference we were pressured to provide a lot of data that it did not make sense for us to provide. We saved receipts, but there was some problem with the way the accounting records were arranged in the spreadsheets. The WMF wanted an after-conference survey to attendees, but drafting valid survey questions is not something that can be crowdsourced to just anyone and none of us want to survey-fatigue our community with questions that will not be used to guide future decisions. There were data requests made of us that did not fit conference activities – “who edited Wikipedia at the conference, or after?” This was a conference for socializing face to face with humans, not for people to isolate themselves at a computer. Also we did not try to capture personal information for tracking purposes, just because all of us are coming from a consumer rights background which values privacy much more highly than WMF research and grantmaking staff thought privacy is worth. There was a feeling of emotional blackmail – “we gave you money, and now you do not meet your obligation to report how it was spent…” Volunteers simply should not be expected to know professional accounting standards, or research methodology, and channeling conference participants into a non-interactive broadcast feed for regular messaging and survey recruitment were never outcome targets that any of us organizers wanted. The WMF requested 200-300 hours of administrative labor and reporting and as volunteers, we had doubts that the kind of reporting they were requesting would even be read or considered by anyone, or that they would be valid data for the kind of research that is usually done even if anyone did want them.
The deep misunderstanding between the WMF and the wiki community in the United States meant that when the 2nd WikiConference was proposed, the WMF offered zero funding for it. When the surviving organizers from 2014 thought about repeating the conference next year (only boys – the trend has been that all girls are devoured after one wiki experience) we opened communication to see what is possible. From one perspective, the WMF is pro-women, but from another perspective, if women are victimized then there is no support for them and the blame or at least responsibility for their situation falls to they themselves. Even in hyper-diverse communities guys are insensitive, and I am insensitive, and a lot about wiki stresses girls more than it stresses guys. Some parts of wiki are transparent and some are hidden. Wiki strives for transparency, but as with anything, everyone wants to save face and no one wants to personally compromise anyone else’s public appearance. The social side of this is again odd – if wiki people publicly ask for money and the WMF refuses, then that can bring shame to the WMF or community criticism, so it is best to get pre-approval before even asking. All requests are supposed to be entirely public from the start, but the social infrastructure does not exist to make that practice a reality in the face of all the social conflicts that public requests actually bring. I am not aware of what anyone can do to change this, but it is a pattern of practice in wiki organizations.
Abhishek had been volunteering as a board member of the NYC wiki chapter, even though he was living in India and considering a move for school to Boston. I was talking to him about funding, and he suggested to talk with the Wiki Education Foundation to provide some funding and institutional support for a request to the WMF. Since the WMF previously complained about volunteers’ accounting, Wiki Ed might – for example – use their own staff accountant to do the conference’s budget and surely a professional accountant could be trusted to report finances in a way that anyone would like. Wiki Ed had other staff who could do other things, like provide a single phone number at a desk, help professionalize other communications, and involve itself as a stakeholder organization in the conference. First, the conference was imagined impossible. Then, I talked things over with Abhishek, and Abhishek talked with Wiki Ed, and from that an in-person meetup was scheduled to plan initial talks about a conference.
There was a complicated web of communication that culminated in the community’s request for WMF funding going to the WMF through Wiki Ed. I am not certain what happened, but somehow there was a failure to secure pre-approval to propose a grant request to the WMF. That conversation broke down, other community conversations broke down, and the Wikimedia Foundation decided to not provide any support of any kind for WikiConference 2015 in DC. The National Archives provided a conference space for the event. Wiki Education Foundation provided 95%+ of the cash behind the conference and their director published an article in The Signpost which gingerly drew attention to what they gave without mentioning the obvious panic and devastation of not having WMF support. Again, volunteers managed programming, but this time, Wiki Ed staff contributed the majority of administrative labor. After the conference Wiki Ed thanked all the volunteers for all the time they put into it, which was certainly hundreds of hours of planning. Similarly, 200-300 people attended over the three day event and had life-changing experiences. I think the NYC and DC conferences were comparable in size, programming, frequency of deep personal experiences among attendees, external-partner participation, budget, and awesomeness. Again, a lot of WMF staff attended the entire conference. Again, as in NYC, they stayed in hotels while the volunteer conference organizers and scholarship recipients stayed in the local hostel. I can only presume they took their salary while attending. I felt like they had a different motivating for attending the conference than the volunteers and public participants who made the conference happen. If the conference is worth something, then the WMF should fund it. If the conference is not worth something, then why fund staff to attend? The amount of money spent on WMF staff attending the conference was more than the cost of funding the conference (not including scholarships, but still, enough for a conference).
Planning for WikiConference 2016 began in late 2015, a bit earlier than other conferences. Wiki Ed said “not this year!” I think they were a bit burned by the WMF funding snub. Richard/Pharos and I started drafting a grant funding application to WMF. We imagined a conference in Seattle, which after NYC and DC is the third-largest and most organized wiki community in the US and Canada. Again, a few hundred hours of planning went into the event from a planning team and special-project volunteers. So many things were settled, and in the end, the WMF gave tentative approval to fund a $50k event in Seattle. One sticking point from the WMF side was that since the NYC and DC events had been able to secure the donation of a conference venue for all days, then Seattle should be able to do that also. I questioned whether this should be a rule, because I doubted that it was reasonable to perpetually assume that venues in all cities would give Wikipedia free conference space, but the idea guided conversation. After getting the approval, the conference team reflected on the work behind us and the work ahead. After reflecting on the time commitment and some questions about fair attempts to secure a venue donation, the on-the-ground Seattle team was unable to coordinate a Seattle conference. The counterproposal was to take the planning insights and try again for a Seattle conference in 2018, after the 2017 international Wikimania conference already planned by others for Montreal.
I joined the international monthly WALRUS (Wikipedians Active in Local Regions of the United States) online meetup some days later and shared the news both that the Seattle / Cascadia team had done amazing planning and gotten a funding offer. At the same time, although there was an agreement that a conference could be held it was on a shaky foundation without enough volunteers to back up problems in case anything went wrong. Some anticipated partners had also dropped out. Because of the workload and an inability to manage risks, the Cascadia team was not going to accept any WMF grant for a conference. Surprisingly on this call, someone in San Diego spoke up – “If Seattle does not want it, can San Diego pick up negotiation where you left off and do it in California?” Dr. Mel had colleagues at the central library of the city and knew that they library was seeking to host nonprofit groups for conferences such as this. The library is made to host events of this scale, and would provide a venue and other staff support.
I talked with Dr. Mel about hosting WikiConferences, and the concept proved to be a good fit for her, the San Diego library, and the larger Wikimedia community in the United States. Mel was new to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community and I told her that many people burn out in these experiences. I also said that there is no staff funding for organizing these sorts of events. She accepted that, but we did talk a bit more about staff funding. There were some event management roles which really should be funded – negotiating for better prices, setting up communication channels, securing the in-kind donation of the venue when that is a time-sensitive pre-requisite. Overall in the Wikimedia community, everything can be deconstructed to a financial cost. If $1000 of funding can be invested to recruit 10 volunteer hours, or otherwise $1000 can be used to hire a chosen professional to do 30 hours of work at $30/hour, then I think it is more cost-effective in some sensitive cases to just hire the labor. Still, the WMF currently does not entertain discussions along these lines. In the end, Mel was 90% responsible for securing the donation of the venue in San Diego, and then she dropped out of conference planning because of her inability to meet the volunteer time demand in the taxing and unappreciative circumstances which crowdsourcing produces. Mel’s (or anyone else’s) relatively few professional hours might have been purchased, but were instead replaced with a lot of crowdsourced volunteer hours to plan the conference. I understand why this happens – “wiki is supposed to be volunteer” – but there is a great cost to have very talented Wikipedia contributors in their respective fields of expertise cutting back the hours spent doing what they do best to instead spend time trying to fulfill roles of event management in a collaborative, crowdsourced way. Typically, my guess is that 5-20 hours from Wikipedians can be used to minimally replace at poor quality the sorts of tasks which can be done with perfection by a hired professional in 1 hour for $30/hour. Wikipedians excel at Wikimedia project engagement, but outside of Wiki projects, there are a lot of tasks like event coordination, bookkeeping, contract management, business negotiation, and front desk staffing that can be done best in the traditional way with hired staff. It is not really correct to say that WikiConferences are managed by volunteers, because most of the main community organizers for wiki outreach have found a way to incorporate wiki into their professional lives, but it is also not correct to say that any of the organizers are directly paid to manage this event. A little WMF funding to Mel would not have been so strange. Personally, I have been paid to do wiki for years and as a consequence of that I am regularly approached by all sorts of people who even wonder about the concept. Compensation for wiki happens in lots of ways, even if “editing Wikipedia for money” is a taboo that is universally recognized.
I hope the day can come when wiki community volunteers can be matched with funding to have regular meetups and conferences. In person events do so much to inspire wiki contributors. I am continually moved to see people at conferences burst with excitement in the weeks and years after the events to do more activities for wikis and allied free culture movements, and to inspire those around them to do the same. The impact of a wiki conference cannot always be measured quantitatively. Some of the negative outcomes, like trolling, are unfortunate but I wish that volunteers and victims would not have to bear so much of the blame for these things. The current wiki-funding model contains unacknowledged inefficiencies in its use of volunteer time and skills, and actually amplifies the wiki-infrastructure’s already inefficient nature. I still have hope that the critical community mass has already been reached and that community members will continue to inspire other community members to continue the meetup tradition.
If anyone in the future still cares about wiki affairs and reads this later, then I think that I would want them to know how uncertain wiki meetups and conferences are at present in 2016. Except from community participants, wiki-conferences get little respect, criticism for their affiliation with Wikipedia, dismissal from organizations when offered partnership requests, and are the subject of expectations which are normal for similar non-wiki nonprofit groups. Sometimes I think that Wikipedia training is a trend that will continue for some time, and sometimes I think it is a small fad for a small community that is unlikely to continue in the future. I would not say that WikiConference is an idea which has more than minimal support from the Wikimedia Foundation itself, but who knows, maybe now that both Sue Gardner and Lila Tretikov are out the new management style originating in Katherine Maher will be more supportive of community ambition. She has already been uniformly kind to volunteers with unprecedented candor and without reservation about community organizing, and I am glad that her position as director permits her to express her nature in the way that she has been behaving. I expect there will be community / WMF conflicts in the future under her as is the norm, but we wiki community members are beggars for any kind of support for our dream. It is nice to have leadership who is making public displays for positivity and discouraging any kind of negativity in relations, even knowing that a strong community will often be at odds with the WMF.
At the 2016 conference I talked with Katherine about the conference. I thanked her for attending the conference and showing support for what we were doing. She said there was no reason for me to thank her because this was a community conference, and of course she supported these sorts of things. It meant so much to me to have her attend the conference when we felt so traitorous for having the last two, and beyond attending, she was ready to like it even while it was happening and without knowing how it would end. What I gathered from what she said was that she took for granted that if Wikipedia community volunteers organize a conference, then the WMF will support it ideologically and with negotiation financially and in other ways. Bless her for believing that, and for starting from that perspective. I would rather her guide the WMF’s relationship with the Wikimedia from the presumption that the Wikimedia community’s desire to meet regularly with each other has some value that can be matched with some budget however modest, rather than need to be convinced of the value of the event from the inception of the idea. If she missed all the past controversy in her briefing then all the better. I would rather proceed as if having an occasional conference is a normal thing, and not a monumental affront to whatever wild preconception anyone drops on the table. This year’s conference was just as great as the last two. I hope that wiki conferences in the region can happen on a modest scale annually because the demand is there and I like the way that everyone responds to the event and discusses past and future ones throughout the year.