User:Leaderboard/Some things I noticed at Wikimania 2024

Things I noticed at Wikimania 2024. Please note that these are just my thoughts - both positive and negative - and hence no offence is intended (which some may feel from the words - I've tried to be as respectful as possible). The COT (core organising team) did good work overall, and I am grateful to the WMF for having the opportunity to come here. Feedback welcome, and I apologise in advance if anyone feels like I've been rude.

Hotel

As a WMF scholar, the hotel assigned was pretty good overall for the most part. Some specific notes:

Breakfast was good and reasonably expansive - the staff was also helpful.
Internet was OKish, but even the speed of the "premium" version (for which you had to login to Accor) wasn't that high (~8 Mbps). However: it did cause severe issues during a (Microsoft Teams-based) job interview to the extent that I had to use my mobile phone data.
I did try lunch at the restaurant one day - the menu was small, but the seabass fish I tried was good.
The room was comfortable and had enough space. No issues there.
Nice: close to the station and a major mall. Not too far from the venue either.

Conference venue

Were T-shirts offered or did I miss something?
The opening/closing ceremony was accessible with its multiple screens, but I think that the spotlights were unnecessary as it was easy to get blinded by them.
No issues with the food, though I think that the organisers could have done a better job in telling what was "Polish cuisine" in it. They mentioned several times during the conference, yet I had no idea what was Polish and what was not.
Perhaps surprisingly (as someone with vegetarian family members, and hence used to having to be very careful), there was a good attempt to provide vegan/vegetarian food. However, labelling could have been better - in one instance, they claimed that fish was vegetarian which I found quite confusing (and when I tried to clarify with the staff, they seemed clueless). Another related issue was with the non-veg food - the type of meat was often missing and this was a significant issue for me as someone who is quite strict about this. It would have also been nice to explicitly confirm whether something was Halal or not - I did see the Muslim attendees struggle significantly with this.
Pleasant surprise: good choice of alcohol-free beer/wine in the opening dinner! Not so good: the organisers said that anyone with alcohol would be asked to leave the event and yet served alcohol at the opening dinner and closing ceremony (champagne, which did NOT have a non-alcohol equivalent which was annoying). So...
The production team seems to have done a very good job of recording the sessions, so people watching online wouldn't feel like they had an inferior experience.
Despite the one complaint about their representation of a Korean woman, I did like Gosia's drawing (GoTek Rysuje) - I think it succinctly summarised the whole conference. The only note was that this should have been a bit more explicit at the start - at first I thought that this was some sort of "draw/write whatever you want" and was tempted to do something (such as scribble).
Why no hot chocolate? (One person did say that there was hot chocolate at one part of the venue, but this was denied by the venue staff and I was unable to find any evidence either)
Not an issue I ran into, but there were significant complaints about the ventilation and temperature of some rooms.
The Wi-Fi was fast at over 110 Mbps - no issues there.
Eventyay was fine, though why were there two platforms (wikimania-live.eventyay.com and wikimania.eventyay.com)? That confused me.
I don't know whether the two renditions (i.e, the two performances) for the 2024:WikiOrchestra were meant to be accurate or not, but they sounded good.
Regarding Room 6 (i.e, the "social" and snacks room): not that useful if you don't already know someone or are not extroverted. The snacks could have better labelling - while there was an attempt to provide allergen information, it was often blank, and the packets were often not in English (though I am aware that this is because people brought snacks from their own countries).
Event timings are supposed to be strict... except when it involves the Wikimedia CEO (my event was right after hers). The unannounced collision with another event was very frustrating to see as well.

Socialisation and accessibility

I would not recommend the in-person Wikimania for those with limited experience AND introverts - online is better for them. Even if we say "this event is for everyone", in practice you do need some experience to be able to follow these events and conversations. The reason I note is that I did see a few people at the conference that seemed a bit clueless as a result - this applied to the hackathon as well with its unstructured nature.

Even for someone like me, who would fit squarely into the group of "has significant experience", I did struggle to some extent as someone with significantly below-average social and communication skills. Many people seemed to already have found their "group" before the conference (whether it be from being from the same region OR user group OR travelled together OR spoke a major non-English language) - little of which applied to me. It took a couple of days for me to "get going", and even then, I think some sort of "ice-breaker" or similar for such participants would have been helpful. If I wasn't already a technically-inclined person, I think I would have struggled even more - a significant amount of my interactions happened at the Hackathon.

Hackathon

Would have been nice if some additional monitors and tools could be provided for participants - I found working harder than at home due to the lack of an external monitor.
The hackathon lacked structure and hence would not be suitable for people with limited experience or introverts again.

Closing ceremony and party

What's with the repeated bag searches in general? I wasn't the only confused person.
The "party" was a bit weird. For example, the "dinner" was strange as it consisted only of appetisers and drinks.
The wedding was poorly announced and a substantial number of attendees had no idea what was going on. The same applies to the performance after that; seemed to be fine but I wasn't sure on what the context was (related to the wedding or just an independent performance?). Not sure if that was the intent.
I left before this "party" ended (due to a flight the next morning), but seemingly after that party ended, there was ANOTHER afterparty at a pub that went till 2:30 am the next morning? Not sure how people could do that...

Others

The PLN 1000 (~BD 91) prepaid card for WMF scholars was surprisingly brilliant and must have been expensive for the organisers (if not well announced). It was particularly nice in that the card supported Google Pay, which meant that I could afford to take just my phone and nothing else - this was very helpful since I did not want to take my wallet for fear of losing it. Another side benefit is that it implicitly encouraged people to spend on Poland.
The closing photograph was rather confusing, and I have some very negative words to say for the few people that tried to smoke during that...
It seemed to me that a couple of the WMF staff members (while doing a good job) were overworked - perhaps add another staff member next year?
Multiple people got COVID. On the plus side, the organisers clearly offered support and masks for those who needed it. On the other side, I think a bit more transparency would have been nice - for instance a "daily report" on how many people got the virus during the event. This would have also encouraged more to be masked.
Seeing the number of smokers in the street made me wonder whether Poland was the "smoking capital" of the world - this was correctly disproven (yikes) by the internet and one of the organisers...
Due to a job interview for which I could not find any other workaround, I was unable to attend the pre-conference events (this has nothing to do with the organisers but noting on why I didn't say anything about them).
The volunteering tasks that us WMF scholars had to do was a good idea and well thought-of.
I think Telegram isn't the best option - I actually got restricted from it... and those who didn't would be missing out as it was essentially required for the conference.
The improved effort to widen accessibility by providing more WMF scholarships was nice to see as well. That being said, programme coordinators would be right (and one of them did express that to me) to find the waiver of the registration fee and volunteering duties as rather stingy. Additionally, the transparency around who got scholarships was poor - the list of attendees wasn't provided when they said they would (not a big thing), and no scoring data was provided (this was something I complained last year as well when I failed the scholarship application).