Wikimedians for Sustainable Development/Meeting minutes 20201025

Participants

• Ainali
• Daniele Pugliesi
• Marajozkee
• Ezarate
• Gnom
• MPourzaki (WMF) (Wikimedia Foundation Movement Strategy team)
• Winnie

Introduction

• Round of introductions by participants.
• Mehrdad gave an introduction to the strategy process.
• One-pager for the ten recommendations: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategy_Recommendations_one-pager_with_graphics.pdf
• Slide deck to be used by the community: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Movement_Strategy_Prioritization_Events_presentation_ORIGINAL.pdf

First thoughts on priorities

Ainali: Identify Topics for Impact makes sense for this group. The main strength of this user group has been to work with others and to push the agenda forward. Collaboration is a lot of what the group does. Providing expertise.

• SHOULD THIS GROUP CONTINUE TO BE IN A SUPPORTIVE ROLE OR TAKE ON WORK ITSELF?
• Food for thought: this is a rather informal and nascent group. This is an opportunity for growth and development.
• Agree with Gnom's thoughts below a lot.
• "Manage internal knowledge" is an enabler for our work, even though we might not work on that our selves. Ie. a global calender of events would increase our ability to highlight and surface important events. This might even be a global priority for the movement for 2021. A database of ongoing projects in the movement would also be hugely helpful.

Daniele Pugliesi: Not many connections to environment and connecting to sustainability. - in terms of topic area, then recommendation 8 - identifying topics for impact - in terms of the actual environmental impact of the movement, then recommendation 1 on sustainability

Organize an event - WikiLoves SDGs. We could make that again, yearly and bigger.

Winnie: Recommendations are intertwined - identifying topics for impact and investing in skills. In the Kenyan context, identifying ares for impact makes it easier to draw people and be inclusive.

Gnom: From my perspective, the 'Identify Topics for Impact' is the 'natural fit' for our user group's priority. The main goal of our group is to identify and fill holes in Wikipedia's coverage of the Sustainable Development Goals, which by definition are a high-impact topic (maybe even the highest-impact topic overall!). So I think we really should be at the table when this recommendation is being discussed.

'Invest in Skills and Leadership Development', 'Manage Internal Knowledge', and 'Coordinate Across Stakeholders' also connect well to our group's 'spirit', but I think because of our user group's limited resources, we should focus on just a single priority.

Opportunity for recommendation 8 to focus on: internal and external partnerships, events, translations, focus on knowledge, ...

Results

The results of the discussions / prioritization should go here.

• Ideal if the prioritization is at the level of "initiatives," i.e. the particular "chunk" that you want to work on

Our proposed prioritisation: Identify Topics for Impact (Recommendation 8)

• 8–36–C "Identifying impactful topics":
  • reaffirm our group's position that the SDGs are the answer to what is being sought here, align with other advocacy-based groups (feminism? LGBTQ? human rights?);
  • discuss possible 'gaps' in the SDGs (democracy, human rights);
  • if necessary counter a possible 'agnostic' approach to just have this be decided by e.g. an algorithm that analyses WIkipedia articles and readership statistics.

• 8–37–A "List of high-impact topics":
  • collaborate with expertise in order to create prioritized lists of SDG related topics. Lists could for example be divided by the SDGs or content type (articles vs. tabular data vs. linked data vs. media).
  • make lists of high quality content that are suitable to be a start of a translation to other languages or in other ways reusable in other projects (like high quality media files)

• 8–37–B "Bridging content gaps":
  • Bridge content gaps of various kinds:
    • missing content
    • linguistic content gaps
    • cultural content gaps, i.e. going beyond the long-form encyclopedia article
    • technological content gaps, i.e. finding better ways to present content e.g. for mobile or in other ways
  • Figure out ways to go about bridging content gaps
  • Find partners outside of the movement for tackling this issue (UN agencies, national governments, civil society organisations, grantmaking institutions)?