Content Partnerships Hub/Survey of capacity building material and resources

Survey of capacity building material and resources at Wikimedia affiliates

Wikimedia Sverige is working with an initiative called Metabase, a linked open data platform, built on Wikibase Cloud, as a platform to collect information about the activities and documents of the Wikimedia movement – educational resources, reports, presentations, edit-a-thons, conferences and more.

In order to better understand the needs of the Movement, we invited Movement actors to fill out a survey about how they are currently working with capacity building resources – what sort of resources they produce, where they are published and how they are organized. We were specifically interested in whether the Movement members are satisfied with the current way of doing things, or whether there's room for improvement – something that Metabase could help with.

We personally invited 20 organizations to participate in it. We selected Wikimedia affiliates and other organizations (like hubs) that we judged could have an interest in improving and contributing to our common infrastructure in which the Movement's data is stored.

Number of individuals who participated in the survey: 6.

Number of organizations represented: 5.

The survey was available to fill out throughout the month of July, 2024.

Comments and learnings

This summarizes the survey results but you can also read a breakdown of the survey, question-by-question, in this PDF file.

The number of responses was smaller than we had anticipated. However, we should keep in mind that the survey was sent out at a busy time of the year when many organizations were doing annual reporting or preparing for the annual leave. Also, we expected that many affiliate staff would be busy with preparations for Wikimania.

On the other hand, those who did respond did so very promptly, suggesting that they find the topic relevant and important.

Some conclusions that can be drawn from the survey are:

There's a great variety of platforms where capacity building resources are stored – both within the Wikimedia ecosystem (Wikimedia Commons, Meta Wiki, Wikiversity, affiliates' own wikis…) and outside of it (Youtube).
There's a great variety of resources that are being produced – from text (e.g. reports, blog posts) to videos (tutorials, webinars) to interactive resources (WikiLearn courses).
Some, but not all of the respondents already have some structure to organize the resources their organization produces. Most do not have dedicated staff who maintain it; this responsibility can fall on everyone, on the communication staff or on the team leader.
Organizations produce material mostly in the local language of their area, but also some in English. This means that an infrastructure for indexing and sharing resources should make it easy to work in many languages.
None of the respondents thought it was very easy to discover capacity building resources. Most thought it was at least slightly difficult, if not very difficult.
None of the respondents replied no to the question on whether they would be willing to invest time in learning a new infrastructure that would make it possible to index all the resources in one place.

While far from being representative of the whole Movement, the input from our international colleagues has been extremely helpful. It made it clear to us that Metabase has a chance of positively impacting the work that is being done across Wikimedia affiliates and other free knowledge organizations. In particular, it can make it easier to search for and discover capacity building resources produced in different languages and published across the Internet, both on the different Wikimedia platforms and on external websites.