Dear Movement members,
Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) launched UNLOCK last year, an acceleration program
which aims to “innovate in free knowledge” by promoting and supporting
teams that are working on free knowledge projects and helps them turn their
idea into a functional prototype [1]. In the context of movement strategy,
WMDE is interested in building the innovative capacity of our movement, and
with UNLOCK we seek to actively contribute to recommendation 9 "Innovate in
Free Knowledge".
The first edition of the program was held in Germany in 2020 and was a
great success [2]. This year, we scaled to Europe. UNLOCK is open to
volunteers from the existing Wikimedia projects, but also to those who are
not yet part of the Wikimedia movement. We are looking for change makers,
activists, technologists and creative minds who are eager to turn their
idea into a concrete prototype or product/service.
UNLOCK 2021 is now ready! 24 project teams from 17 countries (13 of them
from the European region, 4 even from outside Europe) applied and submitted
their ideas for our program focus *Trust in the Digital Age *[3]. 3 project
proposals were submitted by members of Wikimedia project communities. Five
(out of 24) of the teams were selected to participate in our three-month
accelerator program. This is a brief summary of the participating teams and
their approaches (a more detailed description can be found at the UNLOCK
website [4]):
- FollowTheVote – a mobile app that makes political engagement a fun and
informative habit for young people by combining facts with gamification.
- Government Online Presence Directory – a crowdsourced and fact-checked
directory of official governmental online accounts and services around the
globe. This project is run by two active members of the Wikidata community
and the directory itself will build on Wikidata.
- OpenSpeaks Accessibility – an open toolkit for language archivists on
how to create permanent, accessible and inclusive audiovisual archives. One
of the project member is a longterm Wikimedian.
- Supply-chains.us – an interactive and visual repository of resources,
information, and stories related to technology supply chains.
- ThinkTwise – open source browser extension that detects and highlights
the quality of arguments in written, digital texts.
The program will kick-off on July 1&2, 2021 and ends by beginning of
October. We are super thrilled to be able to support these promising
projects and help them further develop in the coming months. If you want to
be updated about the development of these projects, please follow us on
Twitter [5] or check out our Blog for regular updates [6].
Best
Kannika
[1]
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/
[2]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/UNLOCK_Lessons_Learned_…
[3]
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock-blog/rebuilding-trust-in-the-digital-age/
[4]
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/projects/
[5]
https://twitter.com/UNLOCK_Acc
[6]
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock-blog/
--
Kannika Thaimai (she/her)Leitung / Lead UNLOCK Accelerator
UNLOCK Accelerator: We accelerate your ideas. Together we build the
future of Free Knowledge.
UNLOCK is a program initiated and implemented by Wikimedia Deutschland.
www.wikimedia.de/unlock
Keep up to date! Current news and exciting stories about Wikimedia,
Wikipedia and Free Knowledge in our newsletter (in German):
https://www.wikimedia.de/newsletter/
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
https://www.wikimedia.de/