Dear Wikimedia & Education Community,
I’ve still not met many of you, so first allow me to briefly introduce
myself. :-)
My name is Ben Vershbow and I joined the Wikimedia Foundation a little
under a year ago to direct our Community Programs team, which supports our
communities of practice working in Education and GLAM. My background is in
libraries, cultural heritage, scholarly communication, technology, and the
arts. I worked for more than eight years at The New York Public Library
running digitization, crowdsourcing, and open access initiatives. I have
long been a supporter, user, and friend of the Wikimedia movement, but had
not been deeply involved in the community until now. It is a great honor to
be here, and to have the opportunity to expand my horizons into the world
of education. My goal is to understand how we at WMF can provide the best
possible support and collaboration to leaders and organizers across the
movement who are working to bring the worlds of Wikimedia and education
into greater harmony.
I’m writing now (my first time on this list!) because we have some exciting
news from the Education Team at the Foundation, and some updates about
what’s to come in the near future.
This is a rather long email, so I will summarize here:
*Nichole Saad is now leading the Education Team*
*Workflows and priorities will evolve in Fiscal Year 18-19 (July-June)*
*We will be: *
*revising our materials and resources on Outreach Wiki*
*mapping Wikimedia & Education globally *
*exploring new ways to support the education community in their local
contexts*
*building relationships that can improve, grow, and create new
opportunities for Wikimedia & Education *
*Personnel updates*
First, I’d like to announce an exciting change in team leadership. Going
forward, Nichole Saad will be leading the team as Senior Program Manager,
Education.
Nichole came to WMF in October 2016, bringing a wealth of experience in
global education: from running a kindergarten in Shanghai, to leading
teacher training for the Malaysian ministry of education, to evaluating
refugee education projects in the MENA region for UNESCO, and more. This
broad spectrum of international experience positions Nichole to design (in
deep dialog and collaboration with our community) a bold, effective, and
scalable strategy for Wikimedia in global education.
Already, over the past year, Nichole has been an inspiring thought leader
on our education team, challenging us to re-examine assumptions about how
we support our community of practice, and to think more expansively about
the Wikimedia movement’s current and potential contributions to digital
equity and the kinds of global education goals enshrined in the UN’s SDG 4
<https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg4>.
As we continue to explore long-range strategy, Nichole and I have already
established some near-term priorities and goals, which we would like to
share with you here. In the coming month, we will also be posting a new
Education Program Officer role to fill out our team, so stay tuned for more
news on that.
*We are changing how we work*
Earlier this year the education team published a report
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/01/23/education-survey-report/>based on
research done with our many stakeholders. In light of the findings from
this report, insights gleaned from site visits in Asia
<https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/2017_Asia_report_summary> last year,
and the new Movement direction
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction>,
we will be rethinking *how* we achieve our goals and initiating some
significant changes:
*We will be revising our materials and resources on Outreach Wiki*
The research conducted last year found that our communications materials
and resources were not meeting your needs, or reflecting the work of our
large and active community of program leaders, educators, students, policy
makers, and many more. Based on that research we are going to start making
some initial revisions to the Education space on Outreach Wiki
<https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education>. This will include phasing
out the current visual identity, archiving outdated pages and information,
developing new content that is relevant and current, and improving overall
usability. We ask for your patience as we do this initial remodeling over
the next few months!
It might be the case that we need to reach out to some of you for more
information about pages you’ve created or contributed to. At this time, we
will not be revising country pages, brochures, or the newsletter. We will
be focusing on making sure that information is discoverable, accurate, easy
to use and understand, and relevant to our audiences.
*We will begin mapping Wikimedia & Education globally *
We’ve welcomed two summer interns, Sailesh Patnaik and Alen Amini, who will
be undertaking an exercise to comprehensively map programs, projects, and
activities involving Wikimedia & Education globally. We intend this mapping
exercise to inform future communications and resources, like new case
studies, best practices, regional snapshots, and more. You may be contacted
by the interns for information about your programs and activities. Or, you
can reach out to them directly to share your work! You can inquire at
education(a)wikimedia.org
*We will be streamlining and focusing global support, and exploring new
ways to support the education community in local contexts*
We’ll be piloting some new ways of supporting the Wikimedia & Education
community. We’ll be scaling back on the number of 1:1 consultations that we
conduct — we have determined that this is not a scalable or efficient way
of supporting the community. Instead, at least twice a month we’ll be
holding “office hours
<https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/about/office_hours>” or “Ask
me anything/tell me anything” events where you can get help with challenges
you are facing, or highlight activities and accomplishments. This will be
in addition to a quarterly “Community Programs Showcase” event where we
will highlight community activities in GLAM and Education. The showcase
will launch sometime in the next 6 months.
Finally, we will be piloting an “Education project incubation” program,
where those of you with fresh ideas can develop skills on how to plan,
implement, and evaluate education projects with a cohort of program
leaders. One project will be selected for hands on, in-context support and
a small amount of seed funding. This pilot is in development, and we’ll be
communicating more on it in the coming months.
*We will build relationships that can improve, grow, and create new
opportunities for Wikimedia & Education*
We’ll be spending more time building relationships that can help improve
and grow the use of Wikimedia projects in education. We’ll be undertaking
more activities like the OER Recommendation Comment
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Comment_on_the_UNESCO_OER_Recommendation_Draft.pdf>we
asked for your input on earlier this year. We’ll be thinking about our
travel and conference attendance more strategically, while looking ahead at
how to increase our reach and document our impact.
-----
We will continue to communicate and consult with you as we work together to
promote the value of Wikimedia projects in education. We hope you are as
excited as we are about these new activities! We welcome any questions and
ideas, and look forward to deepening our dialog with you as Movement
Strategy Phase II gets underway.
I also hope to perhaps meet some of you in Cape Town next week. Please
don’t hesitate to reach out to me or Nichole to find some time to connect
in person!
All best,
Ben
--
Ben Vershbow
Director, Community Programs (libraries, education, cultural heritage)
Community Engagement Dept.
Wikimedia Foundation