Research:Global South Technology Survey
This page provides the context for a research with Global South Wikimedia organizations and communities about the socio-technical infrastructure of the Wikimedia Movement.
| “ | By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us. | ” |
In 2017, the Wikimedia Movement started to discuss its collective future and decided in 2020 that, beyond our core mission of developing, collecting and sharing knowledge, in the next few years we will embody the concepts of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. These directions aim respectively to foster an infrastructure that serves free, trusted knowledge through different interfaces to the users of our platforms and to focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. As a movement, we have claimed the highlighted phrase above. With this research we entail the consolidation, synthesization, and presentation the technology priorities of the Global Majority, and the building of a sustained multi stakeholder action process to support the realization of these priorities.
Our assessment to justify this research is that our current methods of prioritizing technology often do not align with our strategic directions. Wishlist of different kinds, hack-a-thons, hiring staff/consultants, tech plans are usually driven by the urgency to resolve outstanding and upcoming issues. And this approach has systematically skewed the development of technology against underrepresented communities and their long-term needs.
This document aims to gather diverse perspectives of the Global South Wikimedia communities regarding the technology infrastructure and list what are its priorities, actively proposing changes and approaches on how to execute them and guiding the implementation of the Movement Strategy 2030, specially recommendations 2, 4, 5 and 9. The main questions we asked ourselves were:
- What specific socio-technical infrastructure does the Global Majority communities envision to better serve their needs?
- Having the hurdles of the Global Majority communities in mind, how do we overcome barriers that prevent communities from fully accessing and contributing to free knowledge, and foster an inclusive and effective socio-technical infrastructure?