Education/Newsletter/June 2014/Wikimedia Deutschland: Summary of activities in May 2014
By Christopher Schwarzkopf (Wikimedia Deutschland)
Volunteer Support
The project women edit is getting more and more established as a monthly meeting opportunity for female editors. On 7 May ten women met up in the Wikimedia Deutschland office in Berlin to edit in both the German and the Englisch Wikipedia together. Moreover, on 31 May a ““women in science”- edit-a-thon took place as the first pilot project within “women edit”. The event was organized by three female Wikipedia-authors. They are part of the recently established WikiWomen-Network that supports women in their first steps in Wikipedia both online and offline. The Network is also currently preparing a workshop that will take place in June in Dortmund. Questions related to the project will be answered by Silvia Stieneker.
The project Wiki Dialog (“Wiki Dialogue”) has started successfully. User Plani suggested a temporary dialogue on the subject of “quality in Wikipedia” and more than 25 Wikipedians are dealing with this topic. Background: Wiki Dialogue is a series of online meetups where the participants exchange ideas about various topics related to the Wikipedia and its sister-projects in order to share their findings and skills. The meetings are based on the concept of cMOOCs and have a workshop character. For more information about the project contact Julia Kloppenburg or Dirk Franke.
Institutional partnerships
The Science Year 2014 - “Digital Society” is in full play! The exhibition ship MS Wissenschaft (“MS Science”) is currently on its tour through Germany and Austria. Onboard: Our interactive exhibit “The Wikipedia principle -free data, free knowledge” that we developed in cooperation with the Open Knowledge Foundation. On 30 May the ship stopped in Bremen where we held a public event with board member Jürgen Friedrich, who spoke about Wikipedia and science.
As another activity in the context of our participation in the science year we officially announced the start of our project “Digitale Kompetenzen” (“digital competencies”), a series of five events that focus on the different skills that are important in the digital society. The first event will focus on the subject of data security awareness and will take place on 23 June in the Wikimedia Deutschland office. The project is co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. For more information about the project contact Valentin Münscher.
Legal and social framework
As already mentioned we we were able to win the German Federal Agency for Civic Education as a partner and co-funder for the Open Educational Conference 2014 (12. & 13. September in Berlin). In May we started the call for participation that will end on 17 June.
In the run-up to the re:publica, Germany’s largest conferences on social media, blogs and digital society, we held an OER-Sprint in our office where about twelve volunteers collaboratively created Open Educational Resources on the subject of digital society. At the re:publica, Wikimedia Deutschland staff member Sebastian Horndasch held a Lightning Talk about OER and officially announced the Open Educational Conference 2014