Salvador, Bahia, was the venue for the Capacity Exchange development team to meet in July 2025. Seizing the opportunity of being in the same place as many members of the Brazilian community, the team held two days of a planning technical meeting just before the main conference – WikiCon Brasil 2025.
Between the 17th and 18th, the team dedicated itself to planning the priorities and demands to be carried out by the technical team in the following months. During the conference itself, the team discussed and better understood the needs of the Brazilian Wikimedia community. On Saturday, July 19th, the CapX team held a training session about the platform, in which we sought to understand the desires and uses of the tool through an analog and collective dynamic between peers.
A description of each activity is given below.
List of priorities: what we are going to develop now
As stated on the Technical plan for the extra year, published on June 2025, one of CapX’s major priorities is to consolidate the integration with Let’s Connect profiles (don’t worry! It will be communicated soon). So we will dedicate a lot of our technical energy to improve the solutions developed, according to the community feedback.
Aside that, we will also fix some minor bugs on the code; increase our code testing and our storybook coverage; and develop a dashboard page for statistical data. One of our biggest goals is also to develop a space dedicated to peer mentorship, to be used by groups and initiatives that run this type of program.
In our two-days technical meeting, we listed 43 tasks to be accomplished by the development team in the next trimester. Among them, 8 are new feature releases (yey!), 26 are improvements that need to be done (based on community feedback and/or technical evaluation), 5 are bugs to be fixed, and 4 are technical debts (i.e., code that needs to be refactored).
Photographs of the CapX development team during its two-day in-personal technical meeting. Author: AJurno (WMB), 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0, available at w.wiki/D2kp
Change requests are put on an agenda based on the demands of both the wikimedia community and the Capacity Exchange Advisory Committee, and the platform’s technical sustainability requirements. We always conduct research to understand the needs and priorities of the community, so we can list them strategically according to the project’s future coordination and governance.
Of course, developing a software is always a work in process, subject to changes along the way. However, having a plan to guide the activities helps the team organize itself and allows us to provide development timelines that are more appropriate for our partners and relationships. As we always emphasize, it is our interest that the platform serves the movement’s diverse needs. Therefore, we invite you and your community to submit ideas for alterations and new features that would help your work within the Wikimedia movement.
It is worth noting that we have already implemented some of the latest feedback we received from the community. For example, the tool now allows users to select multiple ‘capacities’ simultaneously, both on the profile editing pages and in the Explore feature. Also, it’s now possible to filter profiles by affiliation and username, making it even easier to match profiles for peer exchange. The team also went through the code with a fine-tooth comb, removing everything that was obsolete. This makes the tool even lighter and prevents volunteers from wasting time translating text that’s no longer used.
Therefore, we invite everyone to access the platform and discover the latest developments launched at capx.toolforge.org.
WikiCon Brasil 2025 – possibility for community understanding
Throughout the WikiCon Brasil 2025, we were able to speak with people who work and contribute in various ways within the Wikimedia movement. Understanding more about their role and practice allows us to contemplate how the platform can be more useful to them.
Photographs of the CapX development team at WikiCon Brasil 2025. Authors: AJurno (WMB) and Donatas Dabravolskas, 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0, available at w.wiki/D2kp
Half of the development team came from the tech market, and had no contact with the Wikimedia community until joining the CapX project. Even though we onboarded them over the months, presenting everything they should know about the wikimedia universe, the opportunity to meet different people, for whom the tool could be useful, further broadened their understanding of the project’s purpose.
Nothing replaces personal contact and passionate conversation about what moves us toward our purpose. After the Conference, the developers expressed their happiness at seeing their work being used by the Wikimedians, and they became even more excited about it and about the relevance of what they were building. By the end of the two-day event, new Wikimedians had definitely been born.
Regarding the training session held by the CapX team at WikiCon Brasil 2025, we conducted an analog and collective dynamic in which participants were divided into small working groups. We invited them to think about and share their main wiki skills and competencies with the group. Then, we asked them to think about how they could use these skills together to carry out a wiki-activity, such as holding an editathon, organizing a committee, or a doing a photowalking.
The results of the dynamic provided the team with several clues on how to improve the information available on the platform and its features. The process also allowed participants to understand how the CapX tool can make their lives easier when it comes to building partnerships and activities within the wikimedia movement.
Photographs of the participants of CapX’s training session at WikiCon Brasil 2025. Author: AJurno (WMB), 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0, available at w.wiki/D2kp
Step-by-step tutorial: see CapX’s new User Guide
The Capacity Exchange is always documenting its activities on the project’s Meta page. Recently, we refactored all the user guide, including detailed information on how to navigate the platform, what is each feature, and what are the currently available possibilities.
Wikimedians can rely on the step-by-step tutorial to better use the tool and improve their experience. In the User Guide one can understand how to edit the user profile and the Organization profile; how to navigate the Capacity Directory and use the Explore feed; how to report bugs and send messages; and how to translate the tool.
By being published on Meta, the User Guide is easy to be translated into any language – and through an interface wikimedians are already used to. Feel free to make it available on your community language.
More info about the Project
The Capacity Exchange (CapX) is a platform designed by and for the Wikimedia Movement.
It is a centrally-designed tool that allows for decentralized capacity building, from the recognition that the knowledge and skills needed for community capacity building are already within our reach, among us. The project directly responds to Recommendation 6 of the Movement Strategy 2030 by providing a service to facilitate matching/connecting people across the Movement for teaching and learning skills, addressing the largest missing item in the movement’s toolbox: peer support.
This second iteration of Capacity Exchange is coordinated and administered by Wikimedia Brasil, with the guidance of an international Advisory Committee, and is planned to last until June 2026.
You can get more information about CapX’s team and project at our meta page, or by emailing us at capx@wmnobrasil.org.
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