Annual plan/2024

This is an overview ot the WMBE 2024 annual plan.

Partnerships

Partnerships with GLAM

The previous years we already had several informal GLAM partnerships with selected museums. More and more museums are talking to each other and are referring to successful activities with Wikimedia Belgium. We plan for more GLAM partnerships, backed by the Flemish Government. WMBE supports third party projects by providing volunteer collaboration and Wikimedia expertise (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons).

To attract more GLAM institutions we can pre-build Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia categories and structured data. Then we can invite the collection officer and the director of the institution to present to them the preliminary results, and the expected extensions and advantages. This can lead to a higher visibility to the general public of the GLAM collection.

Projects with Wallonia GLAM

The French speaking part of Belgium has currently less interaction with Wikimedia Belgium. We plan to have more interaction with the French speaking part of Belgium.

Projects with Federal GLAM institutions

MetaBelgica - We want to conduct more projects with federal GLAM institutions. We recently received a request from four federal institutes to use a federated Wikibase database to merge separated databases from the institutions and to provide an interface with the general Wikidata database, in collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland.

Human resources

Project Managers

We need more project managers. It happens that we have concurrent activities in multiple provinces on the same day. Therefore we need more project managers.

Freelance person

We need to appoint a freelance person to delegate the administrative workload.

Young and female board members

We have currently three 65+ year old board members. We need younger board members and lady board members. But we know that young people and women have more domestic work with young children and a professional career. We want to have more diversity to be able to delegate the workload.

We want to repeat a yearly two day residential board planning meeting to prepare for the yearly budget. This allows the board members to better know each other, and to have a much broader interaction amongst each other and to more easily share ideas. This facilitates team building.

Volunteer support

We want to continue to support volunteers in their Wikipedia and Wikimedia activities by providing them documentation, books, a museum pass, and travel expenses when they are taking photographs or are writing Wikipedia articles. We want to continue to support volunteers that are willing to perform national or foreign travel to attend specific conferences. We want to do the same thing for small national Wikimeets.

Projects

Wikimedia project management

We continue with the current documented way of conducting, supervising, and reporting our activities. This appears to be a solid way of doing projects. Some museums are taking over our way of working, and begin to also use Wikipedia project pages, ListeriaBot and the Events dashboard.

Wikipedia in education

Continue to encourage professors to have academic students to write Wikipedia pages as a preparation of an academic paper. We prepared for the engagement of a freelance person to teach teachers how to benefit from using Wikipedia in the classroom. Therefore we have signed an agreement with the French speaking department of Education. We are wondering if something similar could be done for the Flemish education department.

Wiki Loves Heritage

We want to continue to conduct the yearly photo competition for Wiki Loves Heritage.

Heritage and local history

Heritage and local history organisations do have quite a bit of the same problem having too many old male volunteers and not being able to attract young and professional volunteers that are able to better interact with modern systems to allow for easy free knowledge gathering and sharing. Therefore it is important that we collaborate with those organisations, often locally organised.

Communication

We want to ensure that we reach any person, organisation, or institution with our communication using the best channel amongst all social media and communication platforms. We will continue to prepare videos and provide subtitles in different languages.

We make sure to continue to maintain our operational documentation to ensure proper chapter management using the best fitting Wikimedia platform.