Hi everyone! 

Following up on the announcement my colleague Léa Lacroix made in July 2021 about the grant that was awarded to Wikimedia Deutschland by the Arcadia Foundation to grow the ecosystem of organizations involved in Wikidata software development, I wanted to keep you up to date on what has happened since then. 

A quick reminder on what this project is about: We want to create a Wikidata software development collaboration with a partner from the movement over the course of the next three years. The reason why we want to do this is to make our software more usable by cultures underrepresented in technology, people of the Global South and speakers of minority languages.

We were able to talk about the Arcadia grant and the plans behind the planned collaboration that the grant is meant for at last year’s WikidataCon during a session called “Finding new pathways of collaborating for a sustainable Wikidata software development” (you can check out the slides or the recording of the session).

Besides this, we were able to think more about what this collaboration might look like and mean for the Wikidata software development in the future and what kind of values, visions and plans we have when starting this partnership. We were also able to have some first getting-to-know conversations with people who have shown interest in this partnership. 

We are happy to hear from anyone in the movement who would be interested in talking about this collaboration more: be it to inform and consult on building such a software partnership in the Wikimedia movement, to show interest in joining the Wikidata software development as a partner organization or pointing us to resources to learn from for our planned endeavor or anything else you want to let us know. You can leave your feedback, questions or input on the talk page of this project page.

You can also reach out to me via mail if you are interested in learning and talking more about this future collaboration!  

We are looking forward to hearing from you and to keep updating you on this in the following months and I hope you all have a nice Tuesday!

Cheers from Berlin,

Maria