Hello Wikimedia community,
To help better understand how teams at the Wikimedia Foundation work on
partnerships, staff from multiple departments have been regularly meeting
over the last year to exchange ideas and reflect on this important area of
our work.
In these discussions we realized that the Foundation had not laid out the
common practices that we developed for managing partnerships. It wasn’t
clear why, how, or with whom we partnered, what worked best, and what was
best to avoid.
If it wasn’t clear to us, then it couldn’t be clear to the community
either. Inspired by Wikimedia France’s Démarche partenariale
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim%C3%A9dia_France/D%C3%A9marche_partenariale/en>,
we recognized the value of sharing our own best practices with the
community.
After much drafting and revising, we are happy to announce the publication
of what we have learned in our *Wikimedia Foundation partnership
reflections*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%20Foundation%20partnership%20reflections>,
now live on Meta-Wiki. The page will be an evolving document, and we
encourage feedback from the community: please join us in the conversation
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia%20Foundation%20partnership%20reflections
.
**What we hope this can be used for**
We hope that the reflections document offers an expression of what we do as
Wikimedia Foundation employees and also helps the volunteer community and
Wikimedia movement Affiliates think about how they define the scope and
measure the impact of their work on partnerships.
We also want this document to help facilitate better interaction between
the Foundation the global community. Take for example, the Partnerships &
Global Reach team’s recent collaboration with the Iraqi Wikimedian User
Group <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Wikimedians>. They were able
to work closely with the local community over the course of a year to
develop a partnership with one of the leading mobile organizations in Iraq
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/28/wikipedia-zero-iraq/>, providing
data-free Wikipedia access over mobile phones through the Wikipedia Zero
program.
Departments at the Foundation including Legal, Communications, and
Community Engagement frequently work with volunteers and organizations to
find the right combination of tools and support for their partnerships. We
look forward to doing more with you.
**Doing even more in collaboration with Affiliates**
The Wikimedia Foundation is certainly not the only organization within the
Wikimedia movement with expertise and experience creating partnerships with
external organizations. With the lead of Wikimedia Sverige, Wikimedia
France, and Wikimedia Deutschland, an informal working group has been
meeting to bring together Wikimedians working on developing and maintaining
partnerships.
This ‘Affiliate Partnerships Group’ helps support activities and has
collected the public learning and resources from their experience doing
partnerships in a Partnerships and Resource Development portal on Meta-Wiki
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Partnerships_%26_Resource_Development/Team
that includes support materials, lessons
learned, frequently asked
questions, and other resources.
After meeting at the Wikimedia Conference 2017
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2017> in April, the
Affiliate Partnerships working group have launched a Facebook group:
the *Wikimedia
& Partnerships Learning Circle*
<https://www.facebook.com/groups/313443389072903/>. If you participate in
Wikimedia Partnerships for your local volunteer community, we encourage you
to join the group, and ask questions of various teams that work on
partnership activities.
**Join the conversation**
This effort has involved contributions from multiple individuals and team
at the Wikimedia Foundation, including Strategic Partnerships, Legal,
Communications, Community Programs, Community Resources, Language
Engineering, and more. We want to hear what you think!
Please join us in conversation at the Partnership Reflections page and in
the Wikimedia & Partnership Learning Circle: we want to learn from and with
you on how to best benefit the community with partnerships.
*Wikimedia Foundation partnership reflections on Meta:*
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%20Foundation%
20partnership%20reflections
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%20Foundation%20partnership%20reflections
*Partnerships learning circle on Facebook:*
<https://www.facebook.com/groups/313443389072903/
Thank you!
Jake Orlowitz
User:Ocaasi (WMF)
jorlowitz(a)wikimedia.org
Head of the Wikipedia Library
Wikimedia Foundation
[1] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim%C3%A9dia_France/D%
C3%A9marche_partenariale/en
[2] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%20Foundation%
20partnership%20reflections
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%20Foundation%20partnership%20reflections
[3] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia Foundation partnership
reflections <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia>
[4] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Wikimedians
[5] <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/28/wikipedia-zero-iraq/
[6] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Partnerships_%26_
Resource_Development/Team
[7] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2017
[8] <https://www.facebook.com/groups/313443389072903/