Dear Wikimedia & Education Community,
I’ve still not met many of you, so first allow me to briefly introduce myself. :-)
My name is Ben Vershbow and I joined the Wikimedia Foundation a little under a year ago to direct our Community Programs team, which supports our communities of practice working in Education and GLAM. My background is in libraries, cultural heritage, scholarly communication, technology, and the arts. I worked for more than eight years at The New York Public Library running digitization, crowdsourcing, and open access initiatives. I have long been a supporter, user, and friend of the Wikimedia movement, but had not been deeply involved in the community until now. It is a great honor to be here, and to have the opportunity to expand my horizons into the world of education. My goal is to understand how we at WMF can provide the best possible support and collaboration to leaders and organizers across the movement who are working to bring the worlds of Wikimedia and education into greater harmony.
I’m writing now (my first time on this list!) because we have some exciting news from the Education Team at the Foundation, and some updates about what’s to come in the near future.
This is a rather long email, so I will summarize here:
*Nichole Saad is now leading the Education Team* *Workflows and priorities will evolve in Fiscal Year 18-19 (July-June)* *We will be: * *revising our materials and resources on Outreach Wiki* *mapping Wikimedia & Education globally * *exploring new ways to support the education community in their local contexts* *building relationships that can improve, grow, and create new opportunities for Wikimedia & Education *
*Personnel updates* First, I’d like to announce an exciting change in team leadership. Going forward, Nichole Saad will be leading the team as Senior Program Manager, Education.
Nichole came to WMF in October 2016, bringing a wealth of experience in global education: from running a kindergarten in Shanghai, to leading teacher training for the Malaysian ministry of education, to evaluating refugee education projects in the MENA region for UNESCO, and more. This broad spectrum of international experience positions Nichole to design (in deep dialog and collaboration with our community) a bold, effective, and scalable strategy for Wikimedia in global education.
Already, over the past year, Nichole has been an inspiring thought leader on our education team, challenging us to re-examine assumptions about how we support our community of practice, and to think more expansively about the Wikimedia movement’s current and potential contributions to digital equity and the kinds of global education goals enshrined in the UN’s SDG 4 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg4.
As we continue to explore long-range strategy, Nichole and I have already established some near-term priorities and goals, which we would like to share with you here. In the coming month, we will also be posting a new Education Program Officer role to fill out our team, so stay tuned for more news on that.
*We are changing how we work* Earlier this year the education team published a report https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/01/23/education-survey-report/based on research done with our many stakeholders. In light of the findings from this report, insights gleaned from site visits in Asia https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/2017_Asia_report_summary last year, and the new Movement direction https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction, we will be rethinking *how* we achieve our goals and initiating some significant changes:
*We will be revising our materials and resources on Outreach Wiki* The research conducted last year found that our communications materials and resources were not meeting your needs, or reflecting the work of our large and active community of program leaders, educators, students, policy makers, and many more. Based on that research we are going to start making some initial revisions to the Education space on Outreach Wiki https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education. This will include phasing out the current visual identity, archiving outdated pages and information, developing new content that is relevant and current, and improving overall usability. We ask for your patience as we do this initial remodeling over the next few months!
It might be the case that we need to reach out to some of you for more information about pages you’ve created or contributed to. At this time, we will not be revising country pages, brochures, or the newsletter. We will be focusing on making sure that information is discoverable, accurate, easy to use and understand, and relevant to our audiences.
*We will begin mapping Wikimedia & Education globally * We’ve welcomed two summer interns, Sailesh Patnaik and Alen Amini, who will be undertaking an exercise to comprehensively map programs, projects, and activities involving Wikimedia & Education globally. We intend this mapping exercise to inform future communications and resources, like new case studies, best practices, regional snapshots, and more. You may be contacted by the interns for information about your programs and activities. Or, you can reach out to them directly to share your work! You can inquire at education@wikimedia.org
*We will be streamlining and focusing global support, and exploring new ways to support the education community in local contexts* We’ll be piloting some new ways of supporting the Wikimedia & Education community. We’ll be scaling back on the number of 1:1 consultations that we conduct — we have determined that this is not a scalable or efficient way of supporting the community. Instead, at least twice a month we’ll be holding “office hours https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/about/office_hours” or “Ask me anything/tell me anything” events where you can get help with challenges you are facing, or highlight activities and accomplishments. This will be in addition to a quarterly “Community Programs Showcase” event where we will highlight community activities in GLAM and Education. The showcase will launch sometime in the next 6 months.
Finally, we will be piloting an “Education project incubation” program, where those of you with fresh ideas can develop skills on how to plan, implement, and evaluate education projects with a cohort of program leaders. One project will be selected for hands on, in-context support and a small amount of seed funding. This pilot is in development, and we’ll be communicating more on it in the coming months.
*We will build relationships that can improve, grow, and create new opportunities for Wikimedia & Education* We’ll be spending more time building relationships that can help improve and grow the use of Wikimedia projects in education. We’ll be undertaking more activities like the OER Recommendation Comment https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Comment_on_the_UNESCO_OER_Recommendation_Draft.pdfwe asked for your input on earlier this year. We’ll be thinking about our travel and conference attendance more strategically, while looking ahead at how to increase our reach and document our impact.
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We will continue to communicate and consult with you as we work together to promote the value of Wikimedia projects in education. We hope you are as excited as we are about these new activities! We welcome any questions and ideas, and look forward to deepening our dialog with you as Movement Strategy Phase II gets underway.
I also hope to perhaps meet some of you in Cape Town next week. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or Nichole to find some time to connect in person!
All best, Ben
-- Ben Vershbow Director, Community Programs (libraries, education, cultural heritage) Community Engagement Dept. Wikimedia Foundation