Wikimedia Conference/Program and Engagement Coordination/Wikimania 2017 report/Partnerships

Partnerships in the Wikimedia Movement

Participants: Global reach team WMF (Adele Vrana, Dan Foy, Jack Rabah, Jorge Vargas, Ravishankar Ayyakkannu), Nikki Zeuner, Manuel Merz (WMDE), Daria (WMUK)

Highlights from WMDE:

• Nikki: Mozilla Corporation (new 60 prs. office in Berlin) talks with WMDE exploring possible cooperation in the areas of product development,  community and marketing/communications. Joint workshop will take place in late fall.
• Adele: wiki “snippets” - also meetings with Mozilla (Diana, head of marketing). The turn-over in Mozilla staff seems to be stabilizing now.
• Wikidata project - MoU with a historic research institute regarding, they will create own version of wikibase
• Public health information agency - exploring project with medical editors on Wikipedia.
• Question, how to involve the community in this process? Adele: Not a community consultation but “trusted individuals”. Daria: In the UK there’s a committee like that “Evaluation Panel”, app. 6 people. - Daria agreed to share info on this group.
• Daria: WMUK made a survey on the impact of their Wikimedian in residence, it will be shared on the partnership meta-page.
• Question: once partnerships become “independent”, how do you report them?

Highlights from the Partnerships & Global Reach team (WMF):

• Adele: Along with Movement Strategy - working internally to seek alignment around partnerships culture. This work is meant to bring together cross-functional teams and support the executive team to define the organization’s priorities when it comes to strategic partnerships.There is a necessity to increase the coordination and understanding that we need to be flexible to take advantage of partnerships opportunities when they arise.

Potential partnerships:

• UNESCO president in Florence, tool to collect traditional knowledge
• Approached by a biology professor at UCSF (San Francisco), working to revolutionise biology textbooks - would like to use Wikipedia/Wikimedia project as a platform to host the content he is developing. Collaboration with UK based organization that is launching an app meant to increase access the access to GLAM and Wikipedia content. Follow up: Adele connected them to WMUK.

WMCon follow up and sustainability of the partnerships group

• Quarterly newsletter, sharing updates. Group agrees on Nikki’s draft format, maybe adding a short up-date section on new partners/initiated dialogues
  • nikki sends reminder, deadline annual schedule
  • Adele’s team looks for editors for the newsletter
• Third f2f meeting in the fall in Berlin (this was agreed at the meeting the following day)

Question:

How to share partnership overview publicly, WMF and affiliates. A list on meta with no real details? FB group: Learning circle/cycle? (maybe adjust the title…)

Suggestion that the group posts something at least once a month there.