2019:Partnerships/Lessons learned from five years of partner building at Wiki Education

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Partnerships/Lessons learned from five years of partner building at Wiki Education

Description

External partners are a key to success at Wiki Education. In this session, we will describe several lessons learned as we have worked strategically over the past five years to develop formal and informal partnerships with academic associations, institutions of higher education, GLAM organizations, research institutes, and funders. Partnerships are critical to our work in connecting people in traditional knowledge institutions with the Wikipedia community around the goal of improving English Wikipedia's equity, quality, and reach. After sharing our own lessons learned, we will encourage session participants to think about and share lessons they have learned in their own partnership development work. We will conclude by guiding participants in a self-reflection process about immediate next steps they could take related to partnership work in their organizations/contexts.

Relationship to the theme

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

This session relates directly to SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals. At Wiki Education, we believe that none of the SDGs can be accomplished by organizations working independently. Forming effective partnerships, especially among organizations and individuals in the free and open knowledge communities, is critical for achieving the SDGs. We have deep experience in partnership development and want to share our perspective and knowledge with others. We believe the lessons we have learned from strategic partnership development over the years will be beneficial to others in the free and open knowledge community as they think about the role of partnerships in their own work.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

• Session participants will have a clear understanding of many opportunities and challenges associated with strategic partnership development.
• Session participants will have shared their own experiences with partnership development and connected their thinking to SDG 17.
• Session participants will list several next steps for their organizations to take related to partnership development, including these possible next steps:
  • Identification of potential partners
  • Development of a strategic partnership plan
  • Evaluation of partnership needs
  • Formalization of existing non-formal partnerships
    

Session leader(s)

TJ Bliss, Chief Advancement Officer at Wiki Education (User:Tjbliss)

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Roundtable discussion forum

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room:

Round-table seating

• Audience:

10-30 people. No prior knowledge or skills needed.

• Recording:

Appropriate for recording from single fixed location or from multiple, non-fixed locations. Some participants may want to share sensitive or non-public information about potential partnerships, so a collective decision should be at the end of the session to determine if all participants are comfortable with the recording being published openly.