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Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for a partner organization to jointly design and run the WikidataCon 2023. This organization should be recognized legally in their country, be located in the Global South, have previous experience with running events and have a Wikidata-enthusiastic community. If your organization is interested, please reach out directly to Léa Lacroix before July 31st.

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Dear Wikimedians,

As you may know, the last edition of the WikidataCon in 2021 was organized jointly by Wikimedia Deutschland and Wiki Movimento Brasil. The result of these intense 10 months of collaboration was an incredibly successful online event with about 500 participants, more than 40% of which joined from the Global South. 

This partnership not only created an innovative event, hosting multiple conversations about the future of Wikidata and reimagining it from the margins, but also gave us the opportunity to examine our priorities and points of views, to learn from each other’s experiences and to share skills. You can find a summary of what we learned, tried and achieved in our common documentation.

We’re starting to work on the concept and planning of a new WikidataCon event for 2023, and so we’re very eager to form a new partnership with a new organization in the Wikimedia movement. Together we would design and organize the event and bring new perspectives to this important gathering for the international Wikidata community.

We have defined baseline criteria to help select our future partner, based on our vision of WikidataCon:

• In order to broaden our perspectives and decenter from the existing majority of Wikidata editors, we are looking for an organization located in the Global South;

• Those involved in co-organizing the conference should show a lot of enthusiasm for Wikidata and have an existing connection to local communities involved in Wikidata-related activities;

• We are looking for a group of people with prior experience in organizing events who are keen to experiment with new formats and design the future of Wikimedia events together;

• For administrative reasons, we can only partner up with a group legally recognized as an organization in their country that is able to sign contracts, issue invoices and receive funds from Germany.

This call for proposals will remain open until July 31st. If your organization would like to apply, you need only to send me a private email so we can start a conversation about your ideas and how this partnership would work.

The selection of a partner will take place in August/September 2022. After a public announcement, the collaboration between Wikimedia Deutschland and this organization would run from October 2022 to November 2023. The event itself would take place in a format to be later decided among the organizers (online, onsite or hybrid) in October 2023.

Feel free to share this email with anyone who might be interested or on any relevant channels.

I remain available for any questions, and I’m very excited to engage in discussions with the many organizations of Wikidata enthusiasts in the movement!

Best regards,