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, 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, 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.

**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. 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, 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 that includes support materials, lessons learned, frequently asked questions, and other resources.

After meeting at the Wikimedia Conference 2017 in April, the Affiliate Partnerships working group have launched a Facebook group: the Wikimedia & Partnerships Learning Circle. 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>

Partnerships learning circle on Facebook:

<https://www.facebook.com/groups/313443389072903/>

Thank you!

Jake Orlowitz

User:Ocaasi (WMF)

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>

[3] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia Foundation partnership reflections>

[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/>