 Buenos dias, buenas tardes, buenas noches, and wherever you are, I'm Jorge Vargas, an MSU new manager for regional partnerships at the Wikimedia Foundation's partnerships team. I am here today to talk to you about how we in the foundation engage with different partners across the world and give you a general overview of the Wikimedia Foundation's partnerships team and our work. Very excited to be here at this very first virtual Wikimedia, so thank you so much for joining in and being part of this session. The partnerships team is a team of the foundation that focuses on growing the relationships with all external entities in support of the annual plan that we have at the foundation. We want to develop the Wikimedia Foundation's role as the infrastructure of free knowledge and part of this larger strategic direction around having the Wikimedia movement as that infrastructure of free knowledge. We in the partnerships team work as a team in service of others and in that sense we work across all different departments across the foundation, finding ways to maintain the relationships with large-scale partners, different entities, while also finding ways to test and seed new partnership models and we're going to be talking a little bit more about that later with a quick and few interesting examples that hopefully will keep you all excited about. We also work and collaborate with different local Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers when it's applicable for a partnership or for a collaboration. We want to make sure that we're guaranteeing and the proper scope and implementation of all the partnership work that we're doing and we cannot do that if we're not working with local volunteers and local affiliates when it's pertinent for different kinds of partnerships as you'll see later today. Our focus is to work overall with mission-aligned stakeholders and that is very important and critical for us. We want to make sure that we're working with different partners around the world that are also eager to share in our mission and values. We also want to make sure that we're working with partners that are strategic, that are global, but also that have a regional or local impact when applicable and necessary. For instance, we work with mission-aligned partners across different sectors. That means that we work with government agencies. We work with ministries. We work with tech companies. We work with for-profit or non-profit organizations. We work in the mobile ecosystem. We work with civil society. We work with any player that wants to work with us as long as we're focusing on a joint mission-alignment values and strategic goals together. We work with stakeholders that have global presence. For instance, partners within the United Nations ecosystem. We work with partners in the free and big open like Creative Commons or with global partners in the tech space like Google. We also work with regional focus partnerships and that means that we have a specific focus on some parts of the world, particularly those where we see a more open and interested space to grow such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Middle East and North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a little bit of a snapshot of our team. As you'll see all those wonderful faces all around the world, this is a team that tends to reflect the global nature of our movement and the global nature of our work and efforts. So you'll see representatives that are all over the world, some of them focused on their specific regions, some of them that are based in other parts of the world and have a global approach. But this is the partnerships team and you'll see that we're missing someone in the bottom right corner and this could be someone that we're looking for right now as we're looking for a partnerships manager for Latin America. As I was saying earlier, we source and develop different kinds of partnerships across a wide range of stakeholders and this is five specific groups that we wanted to exemplify during this conversation with you all. One is with device manufacturers. As you all know, mobile is the way in which internet is growing around the world and the best way for us to be part of that growth is to work with device manufacturers that are making sure that we're promoting and putting Wikipedia in front of folks that are using their phones to go online. We'll share about this a little bit more later today but you'll see how we are promoting the creation and the implementation of native apps and different device manufacturers in different parts of the world, specifically in emerging markets or where there is more growth there. We also work with the re-users of Wikimedia content. There's so many different folks out there that look to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects to source content that they want to integrate into their platforms. So what better way to working with them directly and find ways to reuse or help them reuse the content in a better way? And you'll see a little bit of snippet of that when we talk about Wikipedia preview. We also work with civil society out there in different kinds of scenarios. It can range around global advocacy, public policy and in this particular example that we're going to talk about later today, we are going to see how we're also working with civil society partners that want to work and train university students in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, to join our movement and grow Arabic Wikipedia and the editorship in that space. We also work with the United Nations. The United Nations, as you know, have all across agencies, different kinds of focuses, different kinds of work. And we're looking at how we can better work with the UN. We are going to talk about a couple of specific examples. But for instance, we've seen how working with the World Health Organization during the COVID-19 pandemic helped to bring content that was built and created by the WHO into Wikimedia Commons, bring it to a free license and be able to have that knowledge that was built by this entity across and disseminate it around different platforms in Wikimedia. Finally, we also are going to talk a little bit about how we can also work with governments, that means ministries of education, ministries of technology. And in this case, how in Colombia, we're working with the local affiliate Wikimedia Colombia and with the local Ministry of Education to find ways to better engage teachers in the country. Talking about those native apps that I was talking earlier as example number one, we're working with three big global tech partners in the mobile ecosystem that you may be familiar with. Huawei and Microsoft, who have a global scope and Geo, which is a specific mobile carrier in India. For Huawei, we're working with them to build and create a native app that will be available on all Huawei app stores around the world and we will be able to find ways to engage with the users of Huawei phones in this market with specific in-kind marketing and promotions that we're working with this partner in six different countries. And we're going to start seeing a lot of promotion on that app for Huawei users starting August 27th, so stay tuned because that's happening later this month. With Microsoft, we're going to be working with Windows 10 devices that means tablets and computers also later in the month to be able to include an out-of-the-box experience in 16 different countries where we're going to be able to promote this native app of Wikipedia on Microsoft devices. You'll be able to see this all around later in the month. Now in India, we've been working with Geo, a mobile company in this country in order to allow the availability of a local native app on Geo phones. Those are phones that are built on the KOS operating system and that are focused on specific tiers in India that want to access a mobile phone for a better and more affordable price. Geo phones are available for almost 100 million users in India and so far we've seen that more than 3 million people have downloaded the Geo app, the Wikipedia KOS native app for Geo. It's a very interesting experiment that we've been able to test how we can grow outside of the traditional Android and iPhone or iOS systems and start having native apps of Wikipedia to be able to reach folks to where they are and be able to reach folks in their phones that are outside of the usual space. As a second example, you'll see how we were talking about integrating or reusing content on Wikipedia on third-party websites. Wikipedia Preview is a feature built by the Inuka team in the product department of the foundation and it focuses on integrating the page previews feature into third-party websites. As you may be familiar with this feature, page previews is a way in which you can hover over a link on Wikipedia and without having to click on it, you'll be able to actually see a preview of that Wikipedia page on the main page. Now imagine that translated and moved into a third-party website. You're reading the news and there's a link there that you want to see. Okay, I don't understand that word. You'll see the page preview feature on the website that you're navigating but pointing to a Wikipedia content. This is designed as a mobile-first experience and as you can see from this gift that you have on the right, how with folks reading in a website, you'll be able to see a preview of Wikipedia. We currently are testing and have been doing some of the partnership work in Indonesia, in Malaysia and in several countries in Africa with three great partners that have been implementing this feature. We're currently learning from it and you can read more about how we're learning from it on the Dev post that is linked in that presentation that you can find also on Dev. The idea is for us to be able to grow this experimentation, learn from this content reducers and see how Wikipedia preview as a feature can be potentially reused over and over again to provide Wikipedia as a context on reading information on different kinds of websites. Another example here is how we're partnering with civil society organizations. As I was saying earlier, we're partnering across different sectors, across different stakeholders and this is a very interesting partner that I want to talk to you about which is ideas beyond borders or IBV for short. IBV is a partner that we've been working with that aims to create Arabic Wikipedia content and we're testing ways to also find editor recruitment and retention through different kinds of ideas. We're piloting this project working with universities that want to help us bring more new editors into Arabic Wikipedia as well as finding ways to increase content there. We're currently piloting this project in Iraq and we'll be replicating this project in 2022 in Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon and Egypt. This is a program that built on lessons of a project that we had a few years ago called Growing Local Content on Wikipedia or GLO for short that some of you may be familiar with where we partnered with Google to find ways to increase local relevant content on local native languages while also attracting new folks to join our movement. We want to test this new model and find ways to replicate how we can partner with this different kinds of organizations, work with the local communities in the ground and bring new content in Wikipedia that are not necessarily as big as others and have all the potential to grow. We have a little snippet of some data that we're already getting from this pilot and in the first semester across four Iraqi universities over 120 students have enrolled, 74 students completed the course requirements and amazingly two thirds of that cohort are participating women in this group. Thanks to this small pilot this last semester almost 500 articles have been newly created or improved on Arabic Wikipedia. As I was talking earlier, we also have ways in which we're working and partnering with different agencies within the United Nations. Here are two examples of recent work that we've done. Last year, we are collaborating with a World Health Organization and you're gonna be hearing more from them directly on Tuesday on the main stage on how they've been working with us to bring relevant COVID-19 misinformation graphics or graphics that address misinformation at COVID-19 into Wikimedia Commons. This was a month's long effort to really show WHO the value of opening their content on their free license. As you may know, a lot of different partners out there are not necessarily familiar with Creative Commons, with the Open Knowledge ecosystem or how overall they can see value in joining the Open movement that we're all part in. With WHO, we managed to work with them and convince them to open a lot of the infographics as the very first point of collaboration and all of this information has been migrated into Wikimedia Commons for later reuse and integration onto Wikipedia. For example, if you go right now to the article on Arabic Wikipedia around 5G which as you all may have heard of has some misinformation associations with COVID-19 and the vaccine, you'll see some of those infographics already readily available on that Wikipedia article in Arabic Wikipedia. By integrating those infographics, we've been able to see how over 6 million people have seen across different language Wikipedia as the content that WHO donated and shared with us. Also we've seen how groups on a local level have managed to take advantage of this collaboration on the global level with WHO and work specifically with the regional hubs of WHO to create or improve content around health and or COVID-19. This is a huge shout out for instance to the local user group in Malaysia who took advantage of this collaboration and started working with the local hub of WHO in their country to improve, create and make better work and better content in Malaysian language around these topics. Another very cool example of how we work with the UN has been with the UN Human Rights Office of the HAC Commissioner. Following the great work that Wikimedia Argentina has shared in Latin America many years ago, we decided to find ways to start working with UN Human Rights and create a new campaign that has been adopted in the movement now for two years which has been Wiki for Human Rights. Wiki for Human Rights is a campaign that has created improved and unimproved articles in human rights with different kinds of focuses depending on the cycle that we're working on. For instance, they've partnered with Wikimedia Sweden in the context of Wikigap and find ways to create content around women human right defenders around the world. The latest cycle was a work and an effort to increase content on the right to a healthy environment over 24 local events, 35 languages, over 300 people, more than 800 articles created, all thanks to this collaboration and opening the world of open to this agency in the UN. Finally, a more specific and local example coming from Colombia where I'm from originally and it's how we work with Wikimedia Colombia to associate them and work together as a bridge with the local Ministry of Education. The Colombian Ministry of Education is now working hand in hand with Wikimedia Colombia to find ways to promote free access to knowledge, make better educational content, train teachers that they're associated with and parallel to that, find ways in which we as the foundation can also be supporting that partnership. For instance, we're finding ways to integrate Wikipedia preview that feature that I described earlier into the portal that is used by teachers in the Ministry of Education's work. Wikimedia Colombia and the Ministry of Education are also working on teacher training events, webinars to teach folks how to use Wikipedia and we're also looking at how we can support the future hopeful implementation of reading Wikipedia in the classroom, a project that you may have been hearing in other sessions led by the foundation's education team. We're also gonna be running some edutathons that support the work across all of these different verticals of work that the Ministry and Wikimedia Colombia are doing. With that, I just wanna thank you so much for being here, for being interested in hearing a little bit about the work that we do. You can reach us at partnerships at Wikimedia.org or you can find us on Meta as well. If you wanna connect with us, share ideas, have questions and with that, I believe that we have a little bit of time for Q and A. So I will be looking at any question that may come up. All right, we have a first question here that says, are native apps for Wikipedia only or also for other Wikimedia projects such as Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, Wiktionary? Right now, the native apps are for Wikipedia only. As you may know, we support in the foundational Wikipedia native app for Android and iOS and then under that model, we wanted to replicate that same support in different other native app ecosystems such as Huawei, Microsoft or Kiosk Geo. Secondly, we hear from Andy, shouldn't Wikipedia preview be a browser add-on not a site-specific feature? I can't see Fox News, for example, adding it, but people should be able to use it there. Andy, that it's a phenomenal idea. And as you heard earlier, this is something that we're starting to experiment with. This is a project that the product department started looking into basically under a replication of that page preview feature that already existed on Wikipedia. So with that in mind, what we were looking at was how we could replicate a very similar feature that already exists on Wikipedia and moved it into third-party websites. An idea of a plugin, for instance, sounds fascinating, and I really appreciate that idea that you bring to us because maybe that could be a potential iteration of how Wikipedia preview could work in the future. Well, with that, I want to thank you again very much for being here, for enjoying Wikimania. This is gonna be amazing. I know that this is new for all of us being in Wikimania remotely, but it was exciting. So I'll see you all in one of the different floors across the event. Thank you all very, very much and have a lovely Wikimania.