Who forges the partnership?

Cultural sounds okay. Though, I wonder about the open government and open data initiative... It's obviously tricker to take in data, but I wonder about establishing some process to maintain census data where it appears in Wikipedia. This is the sort of thing that I am working on with/through OpenStreetMap, to import map data and keep it updated. Is there a place for some partnership between Wikimedia an organization as the U.S. Census Bureau or NASA on setting up channels for getting data, keeping it updated, and us to make it available in a useful way for Wikimedia projects? they are government, so perhaps are political/legal, yet I look at them in terms of being content providers like GLAM.

Also, the census data issue for the U.S. is a very real one (with all the rambot articles, as well as many uses for the census bureau's geodata). Issues with census data is something OSM has to deal with too, having imported a lot of their geodata into OSM. As step #1, I am working to setup a spatial database with some census geodata, and work with it in similar way as using osm data to make maps.

I'm not sure what role Wikimedia can play, but more support for the OSM-Wikimedia infrastructure work (both hardware and developers) is probably needed. Since we are getting into content issues, the foundation does not necessarily deal with content, so perhaps some of this should be handled through a chapter? (we don't have a U.S. chapter, just the NYC chapter which i doubt is interested at this point, nor has the capacity)

well, the lack of community organising in North America (i.e. there's no movement so far to a US chapter) is certainly a problem in my opinion, but it's not something we can address in this taskforce.

OSM certainly is an organisation we should be working with (and are, to a certain degree) but don't have any resources allocated to it. Same thing with getting access to/integrating Census data etc. This work is done ad-hoc, by people if/when they find the time.

A possible solution is that there be some form of value placed on alliances with organisations we "support" (e.g. OSM) and as a result the WMF/chapters allocates resources (time/people/money) to specific support projects?

Additional support from the WMF/chapters for such projects would indeed be helpful, specifically for developers/tech support.

We had some resources (from Wikimedia Germany) to put towards buying a few servers to support OSM work and integration with Wikipedia. But to make the project really work, there needs to be someone dedicated to provide technical support and development. It's hard to find people with the technical expertise + enough spare time to do the necessary work. So, there's quite a bit that's just not getting done right now that could/should be.

If the basic work is done to get the ability to add OSM maps to Wikipedia, then the potential for further maps and data integration (e.g. census data) is huge. With that comes, the ability to approach governments/organizations about sharing data/content and working with what's already being released. (e.g. the Open Government Initiative in the U.S.)