Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Deutschland/January 2014

As at the start of every month, the following is a summary of our activities at Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE).

TEAM COMMUNITIES

Support programs

At the start of the year, we supported an editing workshop, which provided practical information on getting involved with Wikipedia. The interesting feature of the workshop was that it involved both German and Gaelic Wikipedia. Articles and corrections with a focus on Scotland and Ireland were drafted in a language course and then uploaded to Gaelic and German Wikipedia. Interesting background information on the workshop can be found on Wikipedia:Kurier.

Plans for WikiDACH, the congress organized by volunteers for German-speaking Wiki projects, have been underway since 2013. In January, we supported the organizational team’s discussions and meetings on the event, which will take place from May 29 to June 1.

Thanks to our financial support, it was possible to photograph Thomas Bach’s birthday reception – numerous key figures attended this event and their pictures are now available as free content.

By making contributions towards travel costs and providing organizational support, it was possible to document many more events: The Children’s Rock Festival Wuppertal, the “We’ve had enough” demonstration, and the German Olympic team clothing. Thanks to our support, some volunteers from the GLAM sector were able to travel to the monument preservation fair Monumento in order to consolidate existing contacts with institutions and make new ones.

Workshop on funding guidelines

On January 25, a workshop to revise the funding guidelines in cooperation with community members was held in our new open spaces. A number of intensive online discussions took place before the workshop.

Community events

We supported a research and photography workshop in the Couven Museum. This event was organized on the initiative of the group that meets regularly in Aachen.

Evaluation of WikiCon 2013

The WikiCon 2013 organizational team met in Fulda on January 24 and 25 to undertake a constructive review of the highly successful event. The key themes of the discussions were evaluating cooperation with WMDE, future press work with volunteers, and factors and requirements for a successful event. The conclusion was that after WikiCon comes WikiCon – the 2013 community organizational team is also keen on organizing the 2014 event, and will be presenting a concept for it in the coming weeks.

Wikipedian Salon

On January 16, two community members met in our open spaces and held a Wikipedian Salon on the topic of “Wikipedia and the desire to learn.” We are pleased to be able to support more Salon events in the future.

Zedler Prize

Nominations for the 2014 Zedler Prize are now open. The best articles and most outstanding community projects can be nominated until February 24. The award ceremony will take place in Frankfurt am Main on May 24.

Community space

On February 13, a meeting to discuss the future layout of the community space will take place in the new open spaces. Community members interested in this topic are very welcome to join the discussions.

Wikipedia:Kurier in the Wikimedia Blog

Our blog featured two (slightly edited) articles from Wikipedia:Kurier, the newsletter of the Wikipedia community. These articles should help the blog’s readers to understand the community’s many internal processes in the future.

EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE

Science Year 2014: digital society

We are working as partners with Science Year 2014. Under the heading of “digital society”, topics such as communication, education, mobility, employment and health are being discussed. We are participating in the Science Year with a number of measures aimed at attracting a wider audience to findings, developments, scientific debates and practical projects focusing on online collaboration / participation, digital competences, and online openness and access. Further information on the individual projects will be provided here in the coming months.

Free education alliance established

Together with Creative Commons and the Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, we have launched an action group to raise awareness and promote acceptance of Open Educational Resources in Germany. The aim is to pool our resources and to be the first port of call for other organizations and their decision-makers. As a first step, the organizing team will draft a mission statement and create a website. The alliance will be publicized on re:publica.

cMOOC initiative by the German-speaking chapter

A series of online open seminars based on cMOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) is set to facilitate future discussion on improving social processes within Wikipedia (for example, a welcoming culture, conflict management and feedback structures). In order to reach as much of the German-speaking community as possible, we are currently exploring prospects for cooperation on this project with Wikimedia Österreich and Wikimedia Schweiz.

Women Edit

Women Edit was launched in 2013 with a series of monthly events at the Frauen Computer Zentrum Berlin. Women Edit will continue to run in 2014, and will increasingly focus on the development and expansion of the Wikiwomen network and its supporters. The aim is to build a network to kick off pilot projects. The project is currently in the design phase. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact Silvia Stieneker.

Politics And Society

GLAM priorities in 2014

In 2014, the cultural sector is focusing on three main projects: Coding da Vinci – Germany’s first culture hackathon The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and the Service Center Digitization are organizing a culture hackathon in Berlin with Wikimedia Deutschland and the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany, thus marking a collaboration between two key players from the world of cultural heritage digitization in Germany and two non-governmental organizations committed to open source.

We are hoping that the event will enable us to specifically address cultural institutions and programmers from the open source community. The participants involved in the two-part hackathon competition will work with GLAM content, thus demonstrating the exciting and innovative potential of digital cultural assets. Thanks to their license status, the data sets provided for the hackathon can also be used by Wikimedia projects. Further information will be available shortly at www.codingdavinci.de. Dates:

Hack Day I “Face the Quest”: April 26 & 27 at the WMDE Berlin office
Hack Day II “Meet the Winners”: July 5 & 6 in Berlin

GLAM on Tour GLAM on Tour involves Wikipedians working together locally with employees of cultural institutions, preferably in small and medium-sized towns. The aim of the project is for both parties to learn about and gain an appreciation of each other’s work, with a view to building trust and establishing a long-term relationship between the GLAM sector and the Wikimedia movement that will result in more free content from the cultural sector. Target groups:

Active local Wikipedians and Wikimedians
People from the region with an interest in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
WMDE members
GLAM institutions
Volunteers with connections to these institutions

Planned tour venues include:

Shaping Access 2014 – GLAM conference In 2014, we will be a partner in Shaping Access – the symposium on the cultural and political dimensions of free access to digitized cultural heritage – for the fourth time. It has been roughly 20 years since access to cultural heritage through digital media began, and an aim of the conference is to review what has been achieved so far and what remains to be done. Discussion will focus on international progress in implementing digital access to cultural heritage. Findings will be presented and projects will be discussed in an exhibition. In addition, Wikimedia Commons will celebrate its tenth birthday, and Europeana turns five this year. Dates:November 6 & 7, 2014 in Berlin

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Wikidata

In January, the Wikidata team mainly worked on improving Wikidata’s usability and reducing the time it takes to load data on the site. They also further developed the data sets. Wikisource is now the fourth project (after Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and Commons) that can manage its language links via Wikidata. The software development team gained valuable support with the arrival of Adrian Lang, who will mainly work on Wikidata’s user interface. In addition, the development plan for 2014 was published. This can be discussed during the IRC office hour on February 3. Last but not least, January saw Wikidata cross its 100 million edits mark.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Chapters Dialogue

For the Chapters Dialogue project team (Nicole Ebber and Kira Krämer), the theme for January was once again “interviews, interviews, and more interviews.” In mid-January, Nicole and Kira paid a visit to Wikimedia in Stockholm, where they conducted interviews with employees and members of the Supervisory Board, as well as with Anders Wennertsen, a member of the Funds Dissemination Committee. Alongside the interviews, they also had the opportunity to spend a day at the Wikimedia Sweden office, where they met staff and discussed various topics (e.g. the Wikimedia Conference 2014). During the visit, they were also invited to present the project and methodology of design thinking to all employees. They then traveled to Tel Aviv, where they met the Wikimedia Israel team. Over dinner, they got to know five of the seven members of the Supervisory Board and learned more about their work. Both the chairperson of the Supervisory Board and the CEO were available for interviews. As well as planning the final interviews, Kira and Nicole also began preparing the evaluation and synthesis phase. The findings from the first phase of the project will be available in April.

Wikimedia Conference

In January, our Events Team opened the registration process for the Wikimedia Conference. From April 10 to 13, 2014, representatives of Wikimedia chapters, specialist organizations and user groups, employees and board members from the Wikimedia Foundation, and members of the Affiliations Committee and the Funds Dissemination Committee will meet in Berlin. This year, and for the first time, the program is not being put together by the hosting chapter; instead, this task is in the hands of a program team made up of both paid and voluntary members of the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters from around the world, including Nicole Ebber. The team began the process by asking all participating organizations what they saw as the most important topics. These suggestions were then collected and ranked in importance. An overview of the topics has now been published, along with targets and possible formats. The main conference themes will be “organization, structures and grants in the Wikimedia world” and “success and impact.” The team hopes this new process will enable the content to first be prioritized and structured free from any constraints of timetabling, room availability, or participant numbers. The next step will be to identify appropriate speakers, decide on the length and format of each session, and draw up the schedule.

COMMUNICATIONS

Public Relations

In January, the Public Relations Team focused on the end of Wikimedia Deutschland’s fundraising campaign, responding to press enquiries about public relations issues relating to Wikipedia, doing PR for events at the new WMDE office at Tempelhofer Ufer 23, and familiarizing its new colleague Tjane Hartenstein with the department. For more information about Tjane and her role and responsibilities, please see the WMDE blog.

Michael Jahn attended a debriefing meeting by the WikiCon 2013 organizing team in Fulda on January 24 and 25. The participants discussed how volunteers and WMDE had worked together at the event in Karlsruhe, with a view to improving cooperation at future WikiCons.

FUNDRAISING

The Fundraising Team’s first task after the end of a fundraising campaign is to send out donation receipts for tax purposes to all donors. To this end, the team has to work out how to send out the receipts as affordably as possible (with regard to materials, stamps, etc.) and how to prepare the addresses efficiently for the mail. These preparations require huge attention to detail and will involve all the members of the Fundraising Team until mid-February. The donation receipts for tax purposes will be sent out in mid-March.

In January, the Fundraising Team also focused on the preparations for the switch to SEPA. Extensive changes have to be made to our accounting procedures to ensure that they are fully compliant with SEPA conventions. This meant that the Fundraising Team made several changes to databases in January.The European Commission made a last-minute decision to extend the deadline for the transition to SEPA by six months to August 1. As a result, we were able to put our switch to the new system back by a couple of weeks.

The Fundraising Team recently recruited a new student trainee, who started work in January. Hannah Weber is in her fifth semester at TU Berlin studying mathematical economics. She will work with Henry Laurisch, who will work fewer hours from February in order to concentrate on his studies, and focus on day-to-day enquiries from donors and members.

Job Postings

You can find all current job postings at WMDE listed here. Tags: Current affairs, monthly report