Pine, have you noticed how we're seeing fewer and fewer well-qualified community members actively seeking out the responsibility of various committee roles?  (I'll point out that this is particularly noticeable amongst women within the community.)  It's because they are being bombarded, more and more, by unreasonable levels of criticism.  I can say this with a fair bit of authority because I've been involved inhigh-profile committees, task forces, steering groups and responsible roles for 8 years, and the level of criticism has definitely affected where I'm willing to invest my volunteer efforts.  I turn down 10 attempts to recruit me for various tasks for every one I accept, and I'm not alone.

The Wikimania Scholarship Committee does work that will never satisfy everyone, and all of their decisions will be found wanting by some segment of the community.  It is a very difficult job - there are so many factors to weigh that, even though there are some basic minimal levels of activity expected, deciding between a candidate with a few thousand edits who is one of the most proliferate editors of a small wiki (e.g., the editor mainly translates high-value articles and posts them in a single edit) against one who specializes in high quality images (but only uploads 50 a year) against one who averages 15,000 edits but mainly works in anti-vandalism, against one who has few on-wiki contributions but has trained and educated dozens of very productive editors....well, you see the challenge.  These are all valuable contributors - but their contribution to the movement is very different, and those who value some of those contributions over others will find personal justification in complaining about the decisions the committee makes. 

There may be some reasonable arguments about providing some aggregate information such as the number of applicants from different regions and the percentage that were successful....but again, there are other routes to Wikimania including scholarships from large chapters, which often sponsor community members from other regions, and often select recipients from the pool of WMF-sponsored scholarship applicants. 

Of course, there is an easier way to affect the outcome of these discussions.  Sign up in late 2017/early 2018 to become a member of the scholarship committee. 

Risker/Anne

On 18 April 2017 at 23:32, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Risker: it seems to me that there are two two different issues.

First, fear of criticism or controversy are not justifications for withholding information.

That said, I tend to agree you about the privacy issue for applicants. Any information releases should be compliant with what applicants were told at the time that they applied, and perhaps in future years there can be more specific considerations of what kinds of information should be released. Perhaps not much information will be released this year if users weren't told that the fact that they applied would be published (and my guess is that they weren't), but perhaps in future years this can be done along with other information that is not particularly sensitive, e.g. public contribution histories and public roles such as board or committee memberships.

(Note: I have not applied for a Wikimania scholarship and I don't plan to do so in the foreseeable future.)

Pine

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