Lightning talk on partnering for Wikidata software development: transcript

Key points

• The program is a prototype of partnership that helps other movement groups do sustainable software development for Wikidata and Wikibase.
• It is funded externally by the Arcadia Foundation and focuses on under-represented language communities.
• Wikimedia Indonesia grew its own software team, which works on lexemes and lexical data in Wikidata.
• The Igbo Wikimedians User Group runs Wikimentor Africa, a mentoring and learning program on Wikidata tool development.
• Trust, transparency and accepting differences in how software is built are key to such partnerships.
• Growing a software team needs matching structures and infrastructure, and partners must agree on what can be shared across time zones.

Chapters

1. 0:01Introduction to the shared Wikidata development program
2. 1:21Partners: Wikimedia Indonesia and Igbo Wikimedians
3. 2:32Lessons: trust, transparency and understanding
4. 3:32Challenges of growing organizations and teams
5. 4:12Sharing is caring and closing remarks

Full transcript

0:01Now, it's time to also invite the next speaker to join us. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Welcome to my real quick lightning talk about partnering up for Wikidata and a program that Wikimedia Deutschland has been running for the past two years on shared Wikidata software development. My name is Maria. You can reach out to me now or after my talk as well. I've been a project manager for Wikimedia Deutschland for a couple of years now and I'm always happy to meet new people.

0:34What I'm here about today is a special kind of partnership and for us at least a prototype of partnership with other movement partners which we've been doing for which we started doing two years ago and which is hopefully going to contribute to having other movement partners able to do software development for Wikidata and Wikibase in a hopefully sustainable way. And for that first round of this prototype of collaboration, we are concentrating on underrepresented language communities. We are on Meta, so check us out, look for software collaboration for Wikidata. And all of this is possible because we received external funding from the Arcadia Foundation, which is the foundation located in the UK.

1:21I'm going to real quick talk about our amazing partners, but they have their own sessions here at Wikimania. So if you want to learn more about what they've actually been doing and what they've been learning, check out their sessions. We've been working with Wikimedia Indonesia. They have been growing their own software team over the course of the last 12 months. And this team is concentrating at the moment on the whole ecosystem of lexeme development, lexical graphical data and in Wikidata and building a community with their communities around the whole topic of lexemes.

1:58We've also been working with the ibo Wikimedians user group, have a slightly different approach. What they've been doing with the program of Wikimentor Africa is they are establishing a mentoring and learning program for their community members to contribute to Wikidata tool development and to learn about software development in general. What I'm going to talk about a little bit more is today learnings and important things we've realized as the partner of Wikimedia Deutschland here.

2:32As I said, check out their sessions to learn more about their projects. Everyone who's been doing partnership probably won't be surprised by this slide. But trust, transparency and understanding among partners with each other is key and crucial in this kind of collaboration. So you need to trust the partners that they're doing the right thing, that they're doing the things that are appropriate for their communities in their local contexts. You need to have a certain understanding and acceptance of differences that just because software development is done in this certain way by Wikimedia Deutschland in Berlin doesn't mean it has to be done exactly the way in another location with another affiliate with another community this can only be mastered though by open and transparent communication among partners when doing something new there's going to be change and also especially with those projects there's going to be growth in those

3:32organization and that might bring challenges it might be painful and it needs special attention so you can't just grow like a team from out of nowhere your structures also need to grow your infrastructure needs to grow and you also have to be aware that when establishing a software development team the people working in software development might also have different expectations to working style to communication style to management style than the teams you've been working with before. That is just something that we all have realized we really need to be aware of and need to put attention to.

4:12And finally, a nice note to end with. Sharing is caring. Yes, definitely. I love that sentence. But be sure you know what you can actually share and be open and talk to your partners about, like, how can you actually organize sharing products, sharing features? How does that work if partners don't share a time zone and are actually very far from each other geographically? And with that, I'm ending my lightning talk, hopefully in time.

4:46Thank you for listening. Reach out to us if you have any questions and have a nice Wikimania. Thank you very much. That was massive. We've come to the end of this session. I think we've all benefited one way or the other from what we've learned and being shared.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2023 - Plenary - 18 August - Lightning Talk - Another year for Partnering Up for Wikidata! Collaborations for Wikidata Software Development.webm by Wikimania 2023 (2023-08-18), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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.