Proposal talk:Alliances and partnerships

A good start

Structuring partnerships through the chapters has both strengths and weaknesses. Overreliance on chapters will mean we miss out on opportunities in locations where chapters are absent. Due to the lack of a Canadian chapter we may have missed out on a chance to follow up with Montreal Museum of Fine Art: this past fall the museum incorporated a Wikimedian discovery into its official program notes for a historic photography exhibit. That happened without coordination or planning, and it ought to have been a natural first step to serious coordination. We need an adaptable model that can capitalize on that sort of occurrence. The sort of work that I do (high resolution digital restoration) is replicable across multiple geographic regions.

It comes as a surprise that this report fails to mention the Tropenmuseum partnership in Amsterdam, which is arguably the most successful of all our partnered relationships and could serve as a model for others.

The Tropenmuseum donated tens of thousands of images to Wikimedia Commons.
The Tropenmuseum provided selected high resolution images for restoration and featured content candidacy.
The Tropenmuseum held a partnered exhibit with WMF Netherlands where volunteers contributed content.
The exhibit was national news in The Netherlands.
The President of Suriname visited the exhibit (which was about his country's history and culture).
The exhibit has built a durable relationship between the museum staff and Wikimedian volunteers.

Durova 05:10, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Infrastructure

WMF is a virtual organisation. It is not an infrastructure organisation. Yet it spends the majority of its monies and staff costs on attempting to run a global infrastructure; one which is slowly coming together by the agreement of national governments to spend large amounts of funds.

The problem is that both are trying to build a global infrastucture which can support, in the main, global peer to peer groups. The catch 22 is that while the WMF represents many of these global peers it hasn't the ability to fund the Information and (particularly, the Real Time) Communication Technologies which would enable small and large isolated groups to regularly get together and collaborate. Many of the national funders meantime spend all their time trying to get their educators, researchers and students to think, work, and collaborate outside their usual institutional boxes.

WMF will need to, eventually, agree that its communities are in the content business. It is not in the infrastructure business. Once it does this then the obvious primary overarching need is for a collaboratory of national funders and their NREN who can provide and support the high bandwidth networks & tools; many of which are, in many instances, already there. It's just that they don't provide support for international peers. They are funded through national institutions who are then expected to "collaborate".

And that's the problem. Once you've given money to some organisation and ask their inhabitants to change, they spend all their time talking about "how?"

The WMF doesn't need to change; it's an example of what happens when you offer a simple tool to global peers and say "this is where we're going, go for it". Now they need a few more tools and higher bandwidth networks.

ref: [1] [2]

--Simonfj 16:09, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What about any proposed partnership with OpenStreetMap?