Annual Report 2023/Story: Intersection of Regional and Thematic hubs

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2023

This story focuses on how we throughout the year have had the opportunity to, in several ways, build bridges between various hub initiatives and identify exciting collaboration opportunities. These collaborations have the potential to create increased coordination between different initiatives that benefit our work and our projects. It can also lead to an increased distribution of the material we develop and, thus, an increased value of our efforts.

The Wikimedia movement is global: the platforms have a global range, and the material flows freely across national borders. However, Wikimedia associations have, to a large extent, been nationally focused. This has led to areas with significant regional similarities working, independent of each other, to solve the same problems, and efforts and projects that are inherently cross-border — such as collaboration with intergovernmental organizations — have not taken place.

As a solution to this problem, the global movement has developed various hub initiatives, which aim to increase international collaboration between Wikimedians, as well as shifting power and resources from, for example, San Francisco and the WMF's headquarters to the global movement.

In this task, however, it is extremely important that new silos are not created, that we continuously develop our ability to collaborate between and beyond different actors. As part of that development, we have taken several initiatives during the year to identify intersections and build bridges between two types of emerging actors within the movement: regional and thematic hubs.

Wikimedia Sweden is leading the development of a thematic hub focusing on content partnerships. Together with colleagues in Poland, Georgia, and Ukraine – who are part of an emerging regional hub in Central and Eastern Europe – we successfully applied for project funding from the Swedish Institute regarding digital preservation of natural and cultural heritage. The project will bring a very exciting opportunity to find ways for regional and thematic hubs to collaborate, to strengthen the regional foundation of thematic hub work, and to contribute to thematic focus within regional hubs. It is also an exciting opportunity to develop how different hubs can identify project calls together, apply for, and obtain project funding for joint development work.

Another opportunity to identify intersections and build bridges between different hubs during 2023 was the workshop organized by Wikimedia Sweden and the content partnerships hub during Wikimedia Europe's annual 2023 meeting, which focused on connections between hub initiatives. The workshop saw participation from the CEE hub, Wikimedia Europe, the French-speaking hub, and the content partnerships hub, sparking several new ideas and opportunities. We hope that this dialogue can continue into 2024.

Moving forward, we aim to develop our collaborations with more parts of the Wikimedia movement across different regions of the world. A challenge in this endeavor is that many Wikimedia associations are not legal persons, which is a requirement for many project announcements. To strengthen this capacity within the movement in the long term, it is therefore crucial to support other hub initiatives in their organizational structures.