On August 4–7 Haifa in Israel will host Wikimania 2011, the seventh annual meeting of Wikimedians from around the globe, joining Germany, the United States, Taiwan, Egypt, Argentina and Poland in hosting the conference. Wikimedia Israel, responsible for overseeing their event, has said that at least 600 Wikimedians are definitely attending the event, which, although nominally four days, will also include preliminary events such a Global south meeting on 2 August, Developer days (see this week's "Technology Report"), and a Chapters meeting. During Wikimania proper, over 120 sessions will be spread across five tracks, covering topics such as GLAM outreach, intellectual property law, the global south, and Wikimedia in education (a full list of sessions is available). There are a number of keynote speakers (including representatives of the Foundation, Professor Yochai Benkler of the University of Harvard, and Dr. Joseph Reagle), hands-on workshops, and social events such as a cocktail party.
In preparation for Wikimania 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the sponsorship of 77 Wikimedians for full scholarships and 52 for partial scholarships, to include contributions to both travel and accommodation at the event, which, although not free, offers discount rates to Wikimedians. In a posting on the Foundation's official blog, Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development, wrote that "This year’s group of full scholars represents the most diverse we have ever had! Female scholarship recipients are up to 18% of the total full scholarships, and 53% of full scholarship recipients hail from the Global South (representing 62% of the funding). Moreover, recipients are coming from all regions of the world."
As part of a continuing analysis of the April 2011 editors' survey, the Foundation's Head of Global Development Research, Mani Pande, has written a blog post on what the results reveal about the reasons for not voting in Wikimedia's annual elections to its Board of Trustees. The most recent elections, earlier this year—in which the three seats up for election were filled by Ting Chen, Samuel Klein and Kat Walsh—were generally felt to have engaged only a small fraction of the wider Wikimedia community, despite a field of 18 candidates. This perception was backed up by the survey, which found that only 13% of editors in the survey, let alone the wider community, said they had voted in any such election.
"Among those who had not voted in the election, the number one reason for not voting in the election was they (45%) had never heard of the elections. Thirty-four percent said that they were not interested in participating in board elections", wrote Pande. When the editors who had stated that they had never heard of the elections were asked whether they would vote in the future now that they knew about them, 54% said that they would be interested in voting in the future. Nine percent of all respondents had run or would like to run in the board of trustee elections, with the rest split among "not interested in running" (84%) and "not eligible to run" (8%).
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