The Wikibase Stakeholder Group is a new initiative testing alternative approaches to governance, decision-making and community-building for open source digital knowledge management. It aims to facilitate collaboration across various institutional and individual partners in order to ensure the continued development and long-term sustainability of Wikibase, a suite of tools for data management within a linked open data environment. Wikibase is currently developed and maintained by Wikimedia Germany, a chapter of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikibase is vital infrastructure for the public linked data project Wikidata, but since its open release in 2015 it has been increasingly taken up in research, cultural and institutional contexts due to its flexible, open and collaborative architecture. Rhizome have been piloting the use of Wikibase within GLAM contexts since its release, and have co-organized the first set of public meetups and events around the emerging Wikibase community and ecosystem of decentralized Wikibase instances. Following the success in bringing the community together through these events Rhizome and a few early adopters started the Wikibase Stakeholder Group at the end of 2020. In this talk, we will present the activities of the Group to date, lessons learned from our experiences in collective decision-making, funding for collaborative development efforts, and negotiating between individual project requirements towards a common roadmap in line with ongoing efforts of the Wikimedia team.
Expected prior knowledge / intended audience:
No prior knowledge is required for this talk, except general familiary with open source community contexts and open data management tools. The intended audience is other practitioners actively involved in open source communities, in the governance and organization of communities, and/or the development of tools for linked open data management.
