Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Mexico City, Mexico strategy salon with experts (NGO’s, private sector and civil society) - May 17, 2017/da

Venue: Impact Hub - Av. Álvaro Obregón 168, Cuauhtémoc, Roma Norte.

General Information

  • Objective: Generate information from new voices for Wikimedia 2030 strategy building. Identify real needs and potential relations between NGO’s, private sector and civil society.
  • Method: 4 hour workshop + 1.5 hour cocktail.
  • Participants: 3 groups (NGO’s, private sector and civil society) - 12 participants total.
  • The framing of the workshop was done (without explicitly sharing with participants to avoid bias), under the ideas related to three themes: The most respected source of knowledge, A truly global movement, and Engaging the knowledge ecosystem.

   Summary and conclusions of the event

  • Lack of awareness about Wikimedia (movement, Foundation, and projects)
    • Big confusion between Wikimedia and Wikipedia. None of the participants knew what Wikimedia or the Wikimedia foundation were, and were adamant on the fact that Wikimedia needed a better strategy to raise awareness about this differentiation in the future strategy.
  • Value of Wikipedia today and how it can be extended for 2030
    • Everyone in the different sectors shared that democratization of free knowledge was one of the main values of Wikipedia, yet it also came with responsibilities and risks.
    • Collaboration and getting more people to have access is an important role of Wikipedia. Making everyone be part of the sum of all knowledge (as a contributor) empowers and enables them. However, a big part of the group recognized how challenging actually being part of Wikipedia is, and how sometimes this value remains "on paper", and not in reality.
    • Open and free access to a lot of information continues to be the main point of Wikipedia. NGOs focused more on the Freedom of Expression and to reply were core to the project, whereas the private sector and civil society highlighted the immediacy of access to information.
  • Wikipedia's challenges and opportunities for the future
    • Trust and verifiability - "Anyone can edit" continues to be a distrusted model. All sectors agreed that the fact that anyone can add information immediately diminishes the trustworthiness of the information, despite there are some rules in place to avoid "fake content". Only 2 participants were aware of how the volunteer community operated to verify content, and there was overall a general lack of information on how Wikipedia works.
    • Information may not be true, and there is a need to have more "auditing" of the information online - a trend growing with the current political scene.
    • There's a big branding issue, and a negative association of Wikipedia with "information that can't be trusted", "information just for quick facts", or "something you can't use in school". The representatives from the private sector also highlighted negative associations with other names, such as Wikileaks, which were damaging Wikipedia's brand in the country.
  • Challenges for information and knowledge today and in the future
    • Information and knowledge is currently constructed in a restricted framework (legal, institutional, and socio economic), and working on the frameworks in which all of it is created and shared is very important. NGOs in particular were very adamant on how information should be protected against monopolies, dictatorship regimes, and political influences that are affecting how people consume and create information.
    • New technologies are making information and knowledge care for many other additional layers that were not present before. For instance, with surveillance and privacy concerns increasing with the technology evolution about who and what is said, freedom of expression and related values are threatened.
    • After a vivid discussion among the sectors, there was consensus on the fact that the biggest challenge for information in the future in the Mexican context is the massive amount of information to which people are exposed to, and how that could be a power of control by major influencers. "Fake news", "post truth", and the challenge of deep analysis of information vis a vis a major exposure to it with increasing immediacy (thanks to mobile) were the biggest challenges to care for.

Participants (General description)

The partner facilitator for this event and WMF built a list of representatives of three different sectors: civil society, NGOs and social movements, and private/corporate sector. The selection was made based on people with new ideas, and not the traditional or “stereotype” group representative. With this, we were able to gather an interesting mix of profiles, including representatives from the medical and financial sector, NGOs working on migration and security, representatives from LGBT and digital rights movements, among others.

Wikimedia Mexico was also part of the event as guests. Their participation (as well as WMF's) was limited, and we were not part of the group discussions for them not to be biased. Having 3 representatives from Wikimedia Mexico was great at the end - we had a Q&A session to address all doubts participants had about our movement, and particularly, their work in Mexico.

Media (All CC BY-SA 4.0 By Jorge Vargas)

  • Photos and Videos (All)
  • All videos (12GB download) (Includes full videos of intros and Q&A with Chapter)
    • There are videos of 9 separate participant saying what they think of Wikimedia, Wikipedia, their values, and their challenges.

Participants List

Civil society

  • Diana Mora - Criminal attorney
  • Soledad Salas - Entrepreneur
  • Jonathan Silva - Psychoanalyst and teacher for children with special needs

Private sector

  • Gabriela Ugarte - Financial sector
  • Mauricio Villa - Hospital administrator and PR agent
  • Odile Cortes - CSR consultant

NGOs and social movements

  • Gabriela Capó - Insyde (Democratic and social security)
  • Luis Miguel Martinez Internet Society MX and Professor @ Ibero (Internet access)
  • Inés Gimenez - INEDIM (Migration rights)
  • Enrique Torre - Allout (LGBT rights)
  • Sofía Ortega - Ashoka (Social Entrepreneurship)
  • Carlos Britto - R3D (Digital rights advocacy)

Aktiviteter

  1. Tearing down perception: Each group will build a “stereotype” of each other based on what they know and how every group is understood. This will provide a starting point upon which every group will need to work to properly communicate and position itself toward the rest.
  2. Defining and comparing objectives: Having common interest is the foundation of any relationship; in order to be able to establish any possible link amongst groups we first need to clarify common interests.
  3. Understanding needs: What every group needs from each other in order to better achieve its goals and what they can provide to others.
  4. Generating synergies through Wikimedia: How and where can Wikimedia add value to these groups as well as the possibilities each one envisions toward 2030.
  5. Cocktail and networking