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