Unlocking Collaboration Through Capacity Exchange: Highlights from EduWiki Conference 2025

Have you ever struggled to find the right person to collaborate with on a Wikimedia project — someone who shares your interests, complements your skills, or has the experience you’re looking for? For many contributors across the Wikimedia movement, especially in education and program work, the challenge isn’t a lack of talent — it’s knowing where and how to find it. Despite a global community full of passionate and knowledgeable individuals, opportunities for meaningful collaboration often get lost in silos. That’s where Capacity Exchange (CapX) comes in: a platform designed to unlock the potential of our collective knowledge by making it easier to connect, share, and grow together.

We, as facilitators of the Capacity Exchange (CapX) session, led an interactive workshop titled “Capacity Exchange: Unlocking Potential to Build, Exchange, and Grow” at the EduWiki Conference 2025 in Bogotá, aimed at exploring how Wikimedia movement contributors can better connect, collaborate, and grow through skill-sharing. The session brought together educators, program leaders, and Wikimedia organizers from around the world to simulate real-world collaboration challenges. Through this hands-on activity, we introduced participants to the Capacity Exchange (CapX) platform, a growing directory that connects Wikimedians based on skills, needs, and interests.

We kicked things off with a lively icebreaker and an engaging simulation designed to mirror real-world collaboration challenges. Each participant received a card representing a Wikimedia-related skill from the Capacity Exchange (CapX) directory. Then, working with a fictional EduWiki conference planning task, participants formed teams by connecting with others who had complementary skills. Using their combined strengths, each group co-designed a basic event plan. Finally, teams presented their plans, reflected on how they found collaborators, and discussed what was easy or hard about the process, what worked well, and what was missing. This activity highlighted the common challenge of navigating networks and matching the right people to the right tasks, a reality that many Wikimedia education organizers regularly face.

Following the group work, we introduced CapX as a platform designed to address the very challenges participants had just experienced. We guided them through the process of creating a CapX account, filling in their profiles with relevant skills and interests, and exploring how to browse or search for potential collaborators. We also shared real examples of successful mentoring and cross-regional collaboration facilitated through the platform. This portion of the session helped participants see how CapX can serve as a vital bridge across communities, enabling more sustainable mentorship, effective program development, and more efficient knowledge exchange within the Wikimedia movement.

Participants left the session with a renewed understanding of the importance of structured collaboration tools not only for planning events but for building stronger, more resilient education programs across the movement.

Join the Movement! Interested in contributing your skills or finding a mentor? Explore Capacity Exchange and be part of a growing global network of Wikimedians committed to learning, sharing, and building together.

Keep In Touch! If you want to keep in touch with the updates on Capacity Exchange, you can visit our Meta Page, write to us at capx@wmnobrasil.org or join our Telegram Channel