Annual Report 2023/Story: We Develop a Staff Training Plan
In this story, we are focusing on the internal training that has become a recurring feature in our work. The regular dedicated training time makes it possible for us to boost our capacity. It also provides our members with enhanced opportunities and values as we re-use our training materials with them.
In a small organization like Wikimedia Sverige it's not necessarily smart when single individuals have a monopoly on certain knowledge and skills. It's much better to get rid of the bus factor and share what we know with each other. That way, we can cover for each other and complement each other's skills when needed.
In addition to our ongoing informal knowledge sharing, for about a year now, we've been meeting up on the last Monday of each month to learn in a more structured way. We have lunch together after our weekly office meeting – with our remote workers joining us virtually – and then one of us delivers a 45 minutes long training session. We have a document that we all can edit and add our suggestions and ideas on what the next training should be about, based on what we want to learn or teach. Everyone can vote on the suggestions so that we know what should be prioritized and planned for the following months. Sometimes we don't have in-house expertise to cover certain topics, in which case we ask our colleagues in other Wikimedia chapters or organizations in the free knowledge movement for help.
Some of the topics we've had training sessions on are: translating on Translatewiki and using translation tags, lexemes on Wikidata, OpenRefine, GDPR, copyright, SPARQL and the basics of Linux and the command line. We're also planning to learn about AI tools, Structured Data on Commons, cyber security and useful clean-up tools for Wikimedia Commons. Some other ideas that we might to take up in the future are elevator pitches for free knowledge, taking better cell phone photos, as well as audio and video editing.
As we don't want to make this only an internal staff activity, we are also planning to offer some of the training to the members of our association. So far, we've had a training session about copyright with our members, but we are planning for more later during this year, in connection with member meetings and other suitable opportunities.
The staff's involvement in both contributing ideas and delivering training shows that the initiative is appreciated, and that we want to be able to help each other in every possible way when needed.
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