Projekt:Podcast/Avsnitt 265
Avsnitt 265
Inspelningsdatum: 20 april 2024
Publiceringsdatum: 4 maj 2024
Lyssna:
Extern länk: https://wikipediapodden.se/jan-ainali-wikimedians-for-sustainable-development-wikimedia-summit-2024-265/
Programanteckningar
Programledare är Eva Martin.
Special episode
This is the fifth episode in a series of short interviews recorded at the Wikimedia Summit 2024 in Berlin. Thanks to our guest host Eva Martin, we meet Jan Ainali from the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development.
Transcript
This is the fifth episode in a series of interviews from the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin 2024. In the first episode, we heard about the Wikimedia Summit itself, and in the second episode, about the movement charter. And in the coming episodes, we will hear the perspectives from some of the affiliates attending the summit.
Hello everyone and welcome to Wikipediapodden. This is a special episode recording at the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin, 20th of April 2024. I'm Eva Martin, part of the program team for the summit, and today I'm interviewing your usual host, Jan Ainali. Jan, hi.
Hello Eva, nice to meet you here.
Thank you for handing me the mic over. So Jan, can you please tell me what the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development do? What's the purpose of the affiliate?
Yes, so our user group is trying to coordinate the work within all the sustainable development fields on all the project wikis, like we have a wiki project climate change on the English Wikipedia, a German, on the Swedish, but do they talk to each other? Historically, that has not been so much the thing, and we want to do this all over all the Wikimedia projects, have people to collaborate more.
Sounds very interesting. Can you maybe tell us how come you got involved with the affiliate in the first place?
Yeah, that's kind of a long story. It started way back in 2014 when we were doing some education for sustainable development, which was the term that was used in the time in Wikimedia Sweden, and then that sort of was running a little bit on the down low, but in 2019, sustainable development was the theme of Wikimania in Stockholm, and soon after that, Daniel Mietchen contacted me and said, hey, should we start a user group for this? And that's the story.
That's a very nice story. And so today you're here as a representative of your affiliate for the Wikimedia Summit. Can you maybe tell us a bit more? What do you do in your affiliate when you're not here in Berlin?
Yeah, so my usual thing is sort of I'm the contact person for the user group, but I'm also sort of like the general coordinator and setting up our meetings, sending out our newsletters, trying as best as I can, get other enthusiastic about this and take on more roles. So I'm trying to be an enabler.
That's very nice. Do you want to maybe tell me a little bit about your expectations for the Wikimedia Summit?
Yeah, so we have the charter came out in the latest draft just recently, and my hope is that we can collect a lot of feedback into this so it can go through a new iteration, taking the last sort of wrinkles out of it so that everybody can feel happy and proud of it. There's a lot of good things in it already that sort of like, yes, I can really take the small last bits out of it. That's my hopes.
So we are right now at the beginning of day two. Do you maybe already have a highlight that you would like to share?
I do, actually, because we have had sort of, it's called a "gallery walk" where people walk around and put up post-its and feedback on everything, and through that we sort of went into smaller groups. And this morning, our group has synthesized and managed to put down some of the things into very tangible things like these are things that could be changed and also graded through, oh, here's the celebration. This is already good. Don't do anything with this. To some that are deal-breakers, like, the language here is used in a way that I don't think I would feel because they will be responsible for falling on my user group that I'm not comfortable. I would rather say that it's a right that I can do it, not a responsibility. So that was a real highlight, and we got the entire group to be satisfied with that change.
It's very nice to hear also from an event organizer's perspective, and I could really feel the energy in the room during this gallery walk, and it is just great to see the work of the groups coming together. So, maybe as a last question, what are some things that your affiliate is planning to do in the future?
That's a good question. We don't have any specific events yet, so I think we will continue send our newsletter and try to draw people in, and maybe now when we also have this future affiliate landscapes, try to analyze on what maturity level, what tier are we in right now, and do we want to see how we want to grow? Because we're a very informal affiliate right now. We don't have a board. We're not a legal entity, but maybe we should take some steps in some directions and formalize our governance. So I think that is in our future this year.
I wish you the best of luck with this. Thank you, Jan.
Thank you, Eva.
In the coming episodes, we will continue to hear the perspectives from the different affiliates attending the Wikimedia Summit. In the next episode, we'll meet Camelia Boban from WikiDonne.