Lightning talk: using the SDGs as Wikimedia's impact topics: transcript

Key points

• The Wikimedia movement strategy has 10 recommendations and 45 initiatives, with few people to do the work, so shortcuts are needed.
• Reusing the Sustainable Development Goals could make two initiatives, identifying impactful topics and listing high-impact topics, unnecessary.
• The goals also give a guide and a head start for the initiatives on impact, misinformation and content gaps, since a user group already coordinates work on them.
• The 17 goals, 169 targets and over 240 indicators cover all important areas, so the movement would not risk missing topics in its own research.
• Using a framework that governments know would help public institutions see shared aims and partner with Wikimedia.
• He asks listeners working on the recommendation to adopt the framework, spread the word and avoid reinventing the wheel.

Chapters

1. 0:07Introduction and speaker background
2. 1:33The strategy's workload and the case for shortcuts
3. 2:14Saving time by reusing the framework
4. 3:57A flying start on content gaps
5. 4:58Completeness of the SDG framework
6. 5:36Gaining trust from partners and institutions
7. 7:42Conclusion and call to action

Full transcript

0:07It's a strategy and a plan so important that is signed by 195 countries and that these countries spend around 21 trillion dollar every year on developing and refining the goals of that strategy and implementing actions to reach them. And that these goals are available under a free license for us to reuse in the implementation of our movement strategy. My name is Jan Ainale. I'm a co-founder of Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and I've been thinking about Wikimedia strategy since I joined the board of Wikimedia Sverige in 2008.

0:50In 2016 I walked over 1200 kilometers talking to municipalities and agencies about the Sustainable Development Goals and Open Data. I learned a lot about how much backing the sustainable development goals have gotten from public institutions around the world just the last couple of years when working for the Greens in the European Parliament in the end of the last mandate Together we, the Wikimedia movement, recently developed an ambitious and detailed strategy, the movement strategy, that we are now starting to implement and aim to fulfill in less than 10 years.

1:33With 10 recommendations divided in 45 initiatives, there's a lot to do. And our resources, especially in terms of who will actually do the work, are few. By shortcutting a few of these initiatives through high quality externally researched resources on other parts of the strategy, parts that are more unique to our situation and circumstances that will need tailored solutions. Today I will make the case for how using the sustainable development goals as a framework for our topics with impact can save us time, get us better coverage and gain trust from our partners.

2:14So let me start with time, the most pressing issue to address. By using the Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for our topics with impact, we can save precious time and start writing instead of researching. So how exactly can we save time? I think there are three main ways. First, two of the initiatives in the movement strategy, identifying impactful topics and list of high impact topics, can be completely forgone by reusing the sustainable development goals as a framework.

2:55The packaging has already been done and the documentation around it is of highest quality and available in many languages which make this easy to reuse off the shelf for our community. This is also the biggest benefit since we don't need to await the results of the research to give people the knowledge they need to start addressing the looming problems. It will be too late if we only by 2030 managed to identify the topics. Second, we get a guide for how to approach the initiatives, identify the impact of wikimedia projects and content, and misinformation, and may get to more detailed results than we could have gotten otherwise, since we can narrow down the field to well-established topics. Topics that there are already other people doing research on, which means that we can tie in our findings to other bodies of knowledge.

3:57And may also be more directly useful for others to reuse. Third, we get a flying start for the initiatives bridging content gaps and content initiatives in underrepresented communities. Since these topics are already known to our community and there is already a user group coordinating efforts around them. even for newcomers in our community it will be easier to get started if they can just use prior knowledge when joining us rather than needing to pick up new ontologies to interact these content gaps takes us to the completeness of the sdg framework by using the sustainable development goals as a framework for our topics with impact we get a package that covers all important topics and won't risk missing anything in our own research.

4:58The Sustainable Development Goals covers 17 wide areas and aims to improve the quality of life for every single human and the entire humanity. They were broken down on 169 targets and over 240 indicators. Tens of thousands man-years have been spent on thinking what should go in here to make sure we don't miss any important aspects. An enormous effort have also been made to have them easy enough to understand. To paraphrase Greta Thunberg, we don't need to solve the climate crisis, it has already been solved.

5:36We already have all the facts and solutions. But most of us don't know these basic facts. And that is where we come in. However, if we set out to develop our own framework for what has impact, you are risking to miss some aspect that could change people's lives for the better. Changing people's lives for the better is also something we could use some help with. By using the sustainable development goals as a framework for our topics with impact, even people outside Wikimedia will recognize what we are working on and might want to help because they are working on the same things as I mentioned before the fact that 195 countries have signed the Paris agreement that the sustainable development goals are part of makes these goals very well known around the world Public institutions in these countries have been tasked to align their work with them.

6:39Some of them are scrambling to come up with ideas on how to do it. Some are already working hard. For both of these groups, we can help by signaling that we are on the same page as them and working towards similar goals. This will make it easier for them to partner with us. partly because they can understand the value of what we are doing partly because that our allies within these institutions now have a way to frame the collaboration internally in their institution and we need to partner around these topics as we are all volunteers we can't demand of everyone in our existing community to entirely switch tasks and start working on these topics for many people working on what they love is the only reason they keep on doing it and we should of course embrace that since their energy works toward our larger mission that also means that we must

7:42embrace the people outside of the wikimedia movement that cares about having impact on the world and make it a better place in the near future We need to provide them with a framework for operating with us as partners and becoming a part of our community. In conclusion, today I have made it clear how using the Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for our topics with impact can save us time, time that is oh so precious, get us better coverage and not risk to miss life-changing topics and gain trust from our partners who we need to work with if we want to succeed i would like that each of you listening to this who will be working with the recommendation identify topics for impact in the movement strategy whether you are in a chapter user group another affiliate or even just an inspired volunteer to not waste any time thinking about what could have impact but to embrace the global

8:48and well-established framework of the sustainable development goals instead and even further to promise to spread the word about this and inform anyone about to undertake activities in this area that parts of the puzzles have already been solved and to focus their mindset of making impact instead of reinventing the wheel Imagine a world where every single human can freely share the knowledge needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals before 2030.

9:27That is what we should be doing right. Thank you.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2021 Shortcutting the Identify topics for impact recommendation be reusing free content.webm by Jan Ainali (2021-08-17), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.