Education/Newsletter/February 2014/Wikimedia Deutschland: Summany of activities in January 2014

The education and knowledge team of Wikimedia Deutschland had the idea that as of now we could increase our imput to this newsletter by contributing a brief summany of our monthly activities in order to keep other Wikimedians updated about our goals and projects. As we are trying out something new here we are happy to get feedback from you whether you think this is helpful or maybe too much information. Also if you have any questions regarding particular activities and initiatives or just want to learn more about our education programmes here in Germany, please get in touch with us via bildung@wikimedia.de. So, here’s what we did in January:

Year of Science 2014 - “Digital Society”: Wikimedia Deutschland is officially partner of the Wissenschaftsjahr 2014 (Year of Science 2014), which is launched by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Under the heading “digital society” topics such as communication, education, mobility or health will be discussed. We will participate in the Year of Science with several actions in order to increase public interest in current findings and developments, scientific research and projects related to online collaboration and participation, digital competence as well as openness and accessibility in the web. More information about the particular projects will follow.

Action group “Free Education”: Together with Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland has started an action group that aims for increasing both awareness for and acceptance of Open Educational Resources in Germany. Our goal is to pool our strengths and to be a central point of contact for other organizations. The first steps will be to draft an overall concept of the initiative and to create a website. The action group will be officially announced at the re:publica, Germany’s largest conferences on social media, blogs and digital society that takes place for the eight consecutive time in Berlin.

cMOOC initiative of the German speaking chapters: To facilitate the mutual exchange about the improvement of social processes in Wikipedia (for example welcoming culture, conflict management, feedback structures), we are planning a series of open online seminars based on the model of cMOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). In order to reach as many members of the German speaking community as possible, we are examining perspectives of collaboration with Wikimedia Österreich und Wikimedia CH at the moment.

Women edit: The Project women edit, that started in 2013 with a series of monthly events, will be continued in 2014 with a strong focus on the further development of the WikiWomen-Network and its contributors. The goal is to establish local networks of women that will independently initiate projects in the future. At the moment we are in the design phase.