Dear fellow Wikimedians,

We are very excited to inform you that within the third edition of the Wikimedia Accelerator UNLOCK, which has been running by Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) and Wikimedia Serbia (WMRS) in collaboration with Impact Hub Belgrade, we will support seven innovative, bold, engaging and diverse projects – with a total of 24 participants from Albania, Germany, Montenegro and Serbia. The projects show and have convinced us throughout the selection process with new perspectives for free knowledge – and addressing knowledge equity – in different regional as well as thematic contexts. 

In the next four months we will support the teams with coaching, a variety of workshops with experts, regular exchanges and funding. We look forward to working with these following teams who will validate and test their ideas and turn their concepts into functional prototypes: 

• activist.org – an open source platform that breaks down barriers to becoming politically active and thereby connects people and organizations from different social and activist movements. [https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/activist-org/] 

• Game of political participation – encouraging young people in the Western Balkans to familiarize themselves with political decision making and political systems through elements of gamification. [https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/game-of-political-participation/]

• f[ai]r – establishing an ethics certification for digital applications through a holistic examination of the AI system in the social context, addressing aspects of bias, discrimination, diversity and inclusion. [https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/fair/]

• Inclusio – providing user-generated audio descriptions of visual content to the blind and visually impaired. Ideally the solution could be connected and tested on structured data in Wikimedia Commons. [https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/inclusio/]

• macht.sprache. – fostering politically sensitive translation through an open source platform that allows for crowdsourcing and discussing politically sensitive terms and their translations, and through a tool to help translate with sensitivity. [https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/macht-sprache/]

• MOCI SPACE – a digital space to connect activists, grassroots initiatives and civil society actors in the Western Balkans and that allows for co-creating, publishing and sharing knowledge by making use of the Matrix protocol for federated communication. [https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/moci-space/]

• P2P Wiki for indigenous wisdom and biodiversity – an open source tool to collect and safeguard indigenous knowledge, and to raise awareness about biodiversity with a P2P offline-first methodology. [https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/p2p/]

Feel free to click through the projects for further details.

In addition, we shared our learnings and insights from the selection process and the kickoff of the program in the following diff blog. [https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/07/12/unlock-2022-new-ideas-addressing-knowledge-equity/]

Best regards,

Kannika (WMDE) and Ivana (WMRS)