 Hi everyone, this is Maria from Wikimedia Deutschland, and today I want to tell you a little bit more about partnering up for Wikidata in the Wikimedia movement and especially on Wikidata software development. I'm a project manager at Wikimedia Deutschland for a couple of years now, and at the moment I'm focusing on projects around Wikidata and Wikibase. Wikimedia Deutschland has been around since 2004 and currently we're located in Berlin, Germany next to supporting communities like the Wikipedia community or like free knowledge communities in general. We are also hoping to improve political and legal frameworks for the free knowledge movement and also are developing software for Wikimedia projects. Among others we are doing the software development for Wikidata and Wikibase since 2012 and since then like a super vibrant community of volunteers other affiliates, movement groups, data enthusiasts has been growing around this product. The partnership I want to talk about now has the starting point of our movement strategy which I hope everyone heard about by now. Our strategy process and our movement strategy that includes among others again for example that we want to invest more in skills and leadership development in the movement or to increase the equity in decision-making and what we've been wondering is like what can we do what can we change about the things how we do things to breathe life into those strategy recommendations and what we came up with is to create a prototype of collaboration with another community or another movement group and have them enabled to contribute to the software development of Wikidata and Wikibase preferably in a sustainable and scalable way. We are able to do this because we have received a grant from the Arcadia Foundation for the next three years. We spent the first 12 months of this to focusing on finding a movement partner or movement groups who are willing to commit to such a partnership but also to figure out the whole setup and establishment of this partnership among the organizations to then focus on the actual implementation in the next couple of years and to connect all of this to like the bigger ecosystem of Wikidata and Wikibase. The kind of stuff we've been doing for the past 12 months was to reach out to the Wikidata community to make it known that we're looking for such partners. So then after we received some interests from movement groups to spend time on getting to know each other getting to know our ideas about the possible projects about our communities we also had to figure out how we want to set up those things kind of what kind of processes we need what kind of rules and documents for documentation and monitoring and also to fulfill the duties from our grant giver the Arcadia Foundation. When it was time to make a decision we were faced with the plan that we were setting out to find like one partner but have actually decided at this point that we want to partner up with both interested groups that reached out to us even though we're going to do this in like different ways and which is ongoing now is we have that kind of knowledge sharing we want to build up capacity for software development and other communities and continue doing this in the next couple of months. The kind of things we learned while the first 12 months have now kind of come to an end is having an open call and just like putting your idea out there and make people come to you um you will um um yeah you you will get aware of communities and people you haven't worked with in the past. One thing we also learned is that there's no one size fits all partnership we kind of figured out the the kind of projects and the kings of the partnership as we were getting to know our potential partners which made the kind of setup we have now fit very well I think. You should plan in all those knowledge sharing activities because if you don't you just won't have the time and also be aware that not all movement groups are so privileged this is coming from Wikimedia Deutschland which is rather big and has a lot of resources that not all groups and communities can spend that much time on preparing such a partnership. And with this I'm happy to um have you introduce to our both partners the equal Wikimedians user group as well as Wikimedia Indonesia. Wikimedia Indonesia non-profit organization based in Jakarta Indonesia is dedicated to encouraging the growth development and dissemination of knowledge in Indonesian and other language spoken in Indonesia. As one of the local chapters active in the Asia region Wikimedia Indonesia has supported 14 Wikipedias in languages spoken in Indonesia, 12 regional based Wikimedia communities spread across the country and also two other Wikimedia project-based communities. Along with its development there are needs that arise from the communities regarding technical support for Wikimedia projects. There are challenges that need to be faced like differences of languages spoken in each community, the lack of internet access, the absence of guidelines especially for newcomers and also the editing method for Wikimedia project so far which tend to favor the contributors from Europe and North America. One of Wikimedia Indonesia visions for the next two years is to increase our technological capacities for our organization and also for the communities in Indonesia. In line with this vision we are very excited to work with Wikimedia Dotslan for this collaboration project. We are really looking forward for this project because Wikimedia Dotslan has capacities related to the technologies. With this opportunity we are very grateful to be able to learn from Wikimedia Dotslan on how to develop open source software that can be beneficial to the Wikimedia movement. Together with Igbo Wikimedians user group we will collaborate on Wikidata software collaboration project. Within the next two years we will build our own software team. The software team will be focusing in helping the community to solve their needs and then also to helping other resource language communities to contribute in flourishing their languages online through lexicographical data and also involving the communities in contributing to lexims on Wikidata. There are total four languages that we plan to develop lexim in Wikidata namely Indonesian language, Minangkabau language, Sundanese language and Makassari language. Through this project we are very eager to learn not just in terms of increasing our technological capacities but also in building a sustainable and scalable software development environment that can be useful to the Wikimedia movement. Therefore with this software collaboration project we hope that this will emerge as a step for us to strengthen our movement and also for us to be together in freeing the knowledge. Hello everyone, my name is Bennett Dixoday from the Igbo Wikimedia user group and the Wikimedia Africa program coordinator. With me I have 30 pressures who is the co-founder of the Igbo Wikimedia user group as well as the outreach coordinator for Wikimedia Africa. Before we start I would like to teach you to just give us an overview of the Igbo Wikimedia user group. Dixie. Thank you Bennett Dix, hi everyone. So the Igbo Wikimedia user group is a group of volunteers seeking to advance the free knowledge sharing mission using various Wikimedia projects and we do this in form of clubs, fun clubs, in form of fun clubs. These fun clubs are university clubs in tertiary institutions only being secondary schools. Then we also have hubs. These hubs are kind of thematic hubs, kind of thematic clubs in the sense that it could be a group of librarians, it could be a group of Wikideter enthusiasts, it could be a group of Wikicommons enthusiasts. So this is what the Igbo Wikimedia user group is all about in an overview. So I'm going to take it back to the Wikimedia Africa program where Bennett is going to be telling us more about the program. Hi Bennett. Thank you very much Dixie for that very brief overview of the working days ago. So Wikimedia Africa, what is the Wikimedia Africa program all about? The Wikimedia Africa program is a program that is designed to help new and inexperienced developers, programmers, technical writers in the African communities on not just how to make edits on Wikideter but mentoring Africans on building and maintaining Wikideter tools as well as other Wikimedia tools by pairing them with more experienced Wikideter tool creators and contributors. So how do we achieve this? How do we do this? We do this by having experienced technical Wikimedias come on board on our platform as mentors and we in turn, we the Wikimedia Africa team, we organize a two to three days online events monthly. These events are monthly and the aim of these events are to just avail the participants or the mentors the opportunity to meet the mentors as well as the mentors the opportunity to meet the mentors. Next we'll be talking about the collaboration we have with the Wikimedia Dutchland. Our last 30, do you want to talk about this? Yeah, the collaboration is something I was always proud of. So our collaboration with Wikimedia Dutchland started this year and Wikimedia Dutchland is collaborating with the Igbo Wikimedia and Suzer Group as well as the Wikimedia Indonesia and for this I'm going to be talking about the collaboration with Igbo Wikimedia and Suzer Group. The essence of the collaboration is to enable the Wikimedia Africa program make greater impact and this collaboration is both in form of a multi-year funding program support and as well as guidance. So we sometimes we meet to discuss how the program is going, we have full-on meetings to discuss maybe the challenges we have and we get advice, suggestions and comments in this regard and we get to improve on the program including various aspects. So the collaboration has actually been a very great and helpful one. So next I'm going to give you back to Benedict who is going to talk about our achievements so far and this achievement is also based on the collaboration we have through Wikimedia Dutchland. Hi Benedict, thank you very much. Like Tutti said so far we've had a couple of achievements and this is as a result of the collaboration we have with Wikimedia Dutchland. We've had four editions, four successful editions and by editions I mean the four monthly, we've had four monthly events that we've organized and in these events we've had three mentors come on board and these three mentors are not just from one particular place, they've cut across countries, they've cut across continents. So we've had mentors from Germany, from Belgium, from Cameroon who have come on board and these mentors have adopted some of the meetings 11 to be precise so far and over 200 participants as well across this edition have joined us across these various editions we've had and also we've had these participants from five different countries, from five different African countries from Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Tanzania, Côte d'Ivoire and so with these achievements what are we planning to achieve next? What are we looking forward to in the future? So what we are looking forward to in the future, one of the major things we are also looking forward to in the future is to get more experienced software developers, more experienced technical writers, more experienced programmers come on board to be mentors. We're also looking forward to having to develop and maintain at least one community that is inclusive. We're not just looking at having mentors and maintenance come from mentorship but we're also looking at having products that will be beneficial to our community, to the African community. Also another thing we're looking forward to is to get more African communities on board. Like I said earlier on Super we've had five African communities on board. We're looking forward to having more on board and then also we're also looking forward to of course funding. We're looking forward to access to more funding to keep this big initiative sustainable. We don't want to just have this for one year or two years. We want to have this ongoing so that we can at some point move from Africa to a global initiative and yeah for this I know you're wondering how can you get involved and so this year we're allowed to just tell us how you can get involved. So if you're wondering hey this is beautiful how can I get involved? There are various ways you can join us in this program of project. So first of all you can join us as a mentor. You can help us to train the community members. You can also help us to adopt mentees. You can also tell someone to tell someone about the program even though we might from there get more mentors as well or even participants also. You can also help us reach out to other mentors or maybe you can tell us how we can reach them and we are happy to reach out to more people who can get involved in the program because from what we're seeing it's going to be something that would bring the whole lot more people and if you feel you can be a mentor you can tell someone else where you want to learn something if you're free to join us as a participant. So you can get to our project page to see how you can sign up or you can read more about the Wikimedia Africa project. Thank you very much. Like Taji said you can go maybe if you're still on the side if you're still not sure if the program is for you. Just visit our page visit our project page Wikimedia Africa. The link to the page which is dropped on your on the chat. Also visit if you after visiting it you feel this is for me and you want to reach out you can also reach out to us we have a telegram group which the link is also dropped there and just in case you want to visit our previous editions you can also find this on our project So I haven't said all this thank you very much for listening thank you