Wikimedia Deutschland/Data Partnerships Model/Our Three Focus Areas

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Executive Summary

Background

Partners

Our Three Focus Areas

Data Partnerships Scenarios and Working Method

Assessing Partner Requests

Challenges and questions

Conclusion

Our Three Focus Areas Our work falls into three distinct focus areas: Raising awareness Building relationships Facilitating communication Raising awareness One part of our work is to raise awareness about the Wikidata and Wikibase projects. We do this by presenting at conferences and workshops to help partners understand our projects and how they might be useful in each partner’s specific context. For example, when presenting to librarians, we highlight the benefits of connecting their library’s metadata to Wikidata, or of using Wikibase to manage and maintain their metadata. In raising awareness for our projects we want to encourage more partners to get involved and make their data accessible via our projects. Building relationships As members of the development team working on Wikidata and Wikibase, we sit at the center of a Linked Open Data ecosystem. This puts us in an ideal position to build healthy relationships with other actors in that ecosystem. We do this by organizing and participating in community events, helping partners get involved in projects and connecting institutional users of Wikidata and Wikibase with one another. Many partners we speak to are unaware of the fact that Wikimedia Deutschland is a chapter of the Wikimedia movement: a global community dedicated to increasing access to knowledge. We help partners understand this context and connect with the broader community. In some cases, we also facilitate exchanges between our software development team and the technical teams running Wikidata or Wikibase projects at their respective institutions. These exchanges are designed to help partners who face particularly novel challenges. Facilitating communication In our work we have contact with many Wikidata and Wikibase users, each with their own use cases and feedback. An important part of our work is ensuring that this feedback reaches those who make the decisions about our products and that they align with our internal direction, as seen in the overarching strategic vision and the yearly development plans.