Partnership with Engineers without borders

Has anyone thought about partnership with Engineers without borders (http://www.ewb-international.org/). They share the knowledge spreading philosophy of wikimedia and are cloesly tied to technical work, probably making them very able to understand the usefulness of the wikimedia projects.

Collaboration with them could bring wiki usage and editing into both universities and new regions of this world. Maybe they could help with the developement of the mediawiki software, support translators and spread the word about wikimedia in developing regions.

Could you please explain how WMF and ewb benefit from a partnership.. The fact that there are commonalities does not mean that they would benefit from a partnership. Thanks,

EWB International is an international association of national EWB movements. Many of these national organizations are very young and I actually think many of them are strugling with what they could do at all. The national organizations have many members that are students and have much will to help, but may have less clues about how they realy can help. Going to developing countries and inventing cheap water cleaning and energy production systems probably is on many of the members minds, even if they don't know how to actually do this. And probably many imagines that once they have completed their education this will magically all happen in some way. But I think they might be less aware of the impact they actually can do right now at the moment by helping to develope the mediawiki software, support translators that finds markup languages troublesome. They could also help spreading the world about Wikimedia in developing countries in any educational programs they have there. Maybe students that studies technical subjects can help students studying languages to translate articles. Because I think their is a great will among many students to actually work on things that are for the better good of the world, but many have no clue about how.

This kind of work might be as much in line with their mission as any other project they undertake. All that is needed is that EWB International takes a stance that it is and actively encourages their members to do such work. EWB benefits from it because their members get a projects they can work on and wikimedia benefits from it becuase more volunteers works toward their goal.

I like EWB and their work is great. They also have, as you say, commonalities with what we do. I would like to see the two communities working together in some capacity at some time. However, as far as my understanding of "strategy" I don't think we should make recommendations to such a precise level of specificity. I think a strategic recommendation needs to be broader like "alliance with aid organisations" rather than "alliance with xyz specific organisation".

Do you think you can broaden out your suggestion to a more strategic-level thing?

I think the main idea is to make partnership with organisations that has a good understanding of the importance of knowledge, is technicaly oriented, has a large possible volunteer basis and that currently are using technological solutions to problems in developing countries. But I also think that it is important to list and contact possible candidates as early as possible to have something concrete to work with.

yes, for implementing any such partnership it would be necessary to have a good working relationship and contacts and planning early on - but here at the strategy level we only need to "recommend the broad direction" and, if that recommendation is accepted, then the people actually implementing it would work out the specifics at that time. It would be inappropriate for a strategic recommendation to be proscriptive to the level of saying we should ally with a specific organisation or on a specific project.