Open Heritage Foundation/Strategic Plan for Open Heritage Foundation 2020-2022

Introduction

Per our annual, staffing, and budget plans, Open Heritage Foundation’s strategic plan outlines our central mission and the vision we have for our organization’s future and our work with the Wikimedia Foundation in alignment to Wikimedia 2030 vision as the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us in capturing, sharing, and enabling access to free knowledge.

About

Open Heritage Foundation is an incorporated thematic organization that seeks to extend the reach of Wikimedia Movement for bringing the underrepresented knowledge from the emerging communities on the internet.

Core Activities

• Activating communities where there is little or no activity of Open Movement.
• Promoting Open Access culture and Open Data.
• Documenting indigenous knowledge.
• Developing opportunities for under-represented communities.
• Curating a database for indigenous languages.

• Identifying the gaps and problem statements with statistics and issues concerning them.
• Designing innovative and new programs that have inclusive designs that encourage and invite underrepresented communities to join the Wikimedia movement through campaigns.

Vision

As we continue to cultivate our relationship with the Wikimedia movement, seeking out ways we can innovate within it, and continue to grow our project sustainably, we are more committed than ever to the ways in which we can conserve the knowledge from our cultural heritage.

In the past two years, we had the opportunity to work with GLAM institutions and artists to bring their knowledge base on the internet hosted on various Wikimedia Projects. The relationships that have developed out of these opportunities are significant to our conception of the project and planning for its future. We are at once examining our engagements with public and content, our relationship with movement partners, and the structures we hold internally so that all of our engagements prosper.

As a part of capacity building for community, to improve participation on Wikimedia projects from emerging communities, one of the other motives would be to do awareness campaigns to recruit more volunteers who can become a part of the movement.
By taking our expertise and knowledge to allied groups and affiliates and other movement partners from cultural institutions, we are able to witness the moment when researchers, professionals and artists alike realize that Wikimedia and its sister projects are useful, vetted, reliable resources and collaborating together is empowering, gratifying, and impactful.

Creating campaigns programs with GLAM and linking communities to those projects is a critical step in demystifying the process of becoming a contributor to Wikimedia and can more clearly illustrate the variety of ways that one can engage the platform. Our efforts serve to have inclusion of diversity while also welcoming the perspectives from the movement partners. Our focus is to create a support structure that is people-centric, collaborative and adaptive to the community’s needs. We envision expanding and providing support to emerging communities of underrepresented regions for advocacy, partnerships, skill sharing and knowledge transfer in radical and creative way that builds upon the knowledge expertise we have gathered over the last years along with centralizing the networking of various experts of the field to facilitate the knowledge transfer and facilitate the process for our GLAM partners, allied organizations and the members of the Wikimedia movement.

As we ask communities, that we are both a part of and outside of, to collaborate in various projects, it is important as we move forward as a more established organization that we also engage in dialogue with the movement to think about how to demonstrate investment in underrepresented communities and foster open dialogue, consistency, and access, thereby fostering trust.

This is a critical time for our project. The gains we made and the structural development we achieved over the course of the last three years are significant. And the relationships we have begun with institutions, government bodies, public, media, editors, and movement affiliates are significant but developing them further (into something lasting) is contingent on receiving support to continue this work and take advantage of the unique opportunities within our reach.

Long term goals, programmatic objectives

Below are specific objectives for each of the three focus areas which we want to support emergent groups and communities with: content production, content integration on wiki and readership.

It has culminated in a series of priorities and goals, as well as specific operational initiatives for the Open Heritage Foundation - “to empower and engage people around the emerging communities to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.” One of the top priorities is identifying the gaps and problem statements with statistics and issues concerning them.

In the next three years, we want to start bringing in members and professional experts in various fields of GLAM and Wikimedia projects from different regions and ethnic groups, people of color and marginalized people from emerging communities of under representing regions of the world. And identify with them what are the knowledge gaps that are not covered within the movement and our continent. Some of the key priorities we will invest on are:

• Open Access - Open Access advocacy efforts with cultural and knowledge institutions and artists to help make knowledge free, and to help institutions contribute to Wikimedia.
• Advocacy in partnerships - Partnerships development with cultural and knowledge institutions to help make knowledge free, and to help institutions contribute to Wikimedia.
• Documentation of heritage - Knowledge-creation campaigns to add valuable resources to Wikimedia projects.
• Developing the knowledge base, sharing of expertise and knowledge base that everyone in the movement can look into over time - to support the work of editors and pursue opportunities to free knowledge in their geographies for use in the projects.
• Sharing success stories, case studies and challenges we encounter to form a knowledge base.
• One of its core missions is to provide support to groups or affiliates in emerging communities as their allied partners to collect, develop and disseminate knowledge and other educational, cultural and historic content in the public domain or under a license that allows everyone to freely use, distribute and modify that content freely.
• Our strategic objective is to create pathways to social innovation with new and unique projects with the emerging communities for the inclusion and preservation of all forms of underrepresented knowledge, including, oral or non-Western knowledge resources and resourcing in key areas, including, such as advocacy support for partnerships, development of Program design frameworks and technology.
• Our projects encourage underrepresented communities to join the Wikimedia movement to bridge the cultural knowledge gaps on Wikimedia. We organize unconventional and unique styles of campaigns that support documentation of intangible heritage and oral knowledge and are well aligned with 2030 Movement Strategy Recommendations Innovate in Free Knowledge and Manage Internal Knowledge.