Hmmmm.

Let's see. I could cite you two examples which were recently discussed. Early february, I was invited to a meeting in France, TIC21. Regular fee was a couple of hundred euros, nothing I was ready to pay by myself. Finally, one of the organiser invited me for free and told me my leaflets could be welcome on his booth. He considered us partners (his website and Wikipedia). I explained that we could not really be. First because being partner with wikipedia meant the community agrees with the partnership and second because his site, though giving free content, and though sharing some principles with us, is also a very biaised one (planetecologie.org). Still, when I went to the meeting, I discovered wikipedia logo on its poster, and on its CD. A bit as if, all organisations inviting Jimbo for a speech considered themselves partners with us from the moment they paid for him to come. Still, the "partnership" is for now limited but for the fact there are attempts to push us to get involved in things I do not wish us to get involved to. No big deal.

Another example which was abundantly discussed on fr, is the issue of telebotanica, a network of botanists making a free and free site of botanical species. Several of us met his director (I did at TIC21 myself). Very straight guy. Goals exactly fitting ours. The perfect partner. Still... the question left was "what is a partnership here", "what would it encompass" and "who should agree with it". For example, some mentionned we could put his association logo on our main page. Hmmm, no, I do not think we can do this. Also, there was some discussions to have an official contract (the idea was that the most general content could be worked on wikipedia, which would link, for each botanical article, to their specialised file). Still, why would an association have the authority to say "from now on, all botanical articles have a back link to botanica" ? There could be a declaration of intent such as "we share common goals, we share information, and we try to redirect to each other", but imposing to the community the content of the article on forcing a link, is just not an option.

From this, I can just propose a collection of thoughts.

What is partnership, what does that exactly mean ? For each of us ?

This terms seem to be very much in use now, but I think it recovers different realities. I think that as soon as we are doing something with someone, we are partners with him. If I work with you on wikipedia, we both are partners (please, consider that with straight ideas... do not let this comment put you to wander in some strange areas).

A partnership may be a sort of moral agreement, each partner abilities being complementary of the other ones. There is a difference between financial or technical partners. It may be privately owned firms, foundations, public or private organisations, governments...And professional partners may just create something different, depending on their implication (just bringing a little bit of immediate knowledge or help, or maybe much much more...)

It is certainly a bit strange that we should use the same word to define very different realities. I think Lost Oasis is a partner. A private firm giving funds for Wikimania will be a partner. Using google search right now, is a partnership. Us using MediaWiki is a partnership. People like JoiIto or Sunir Shah, are partners as well. Kennisnet might be a partnership. Telebotanica might be a partnership. And BBC doing things with Angela is also a partnership. Should we display all these logos ? How to measure value of each ? Often, it just mean : we share some values.

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