Voices from the Wikimedia Futures Lab

In the last weekend of January there was a new event taking place in Frankfurt, the Wikimedia Futures Lab. It has a lot of documentation on Meta that I can encourage to read. This includes a summary of events leading up to it and links to various relevant research. I was lucky enough to be one of the participants, and since I am one of the hosts of the podcast Wikipediapodden, I used some of the breaks between the sessions to have chats with other participants, panelists and organizers.

The interviews took place over three days, with the first one recorded just before the opening, when we didn’t know exactly what to expect. In a way, the series develops as I and the ten interviewees are getting more familiar with the concept. My hope with this series was to give you, who weren’t there, many different viewpoints of the event and what was being workshopped on.

The selection of whom I got to talk to was a happy mix. Some volunteered after my call for people to speak with in the group chat. Others were a spur of the moment after an inspiring discussion in a break. And other perspectives I sought out, in particular the new Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, Bernadette Meehan, and the head of the program for the event, Eva Martin, from Wikimedia Deutschland, as I thought both these would be important to get the context for the event. The last interview with Eva was made just after the closing session and is a good summary of it and, in particular, an insight into what’s coming next.

All episodes are on Wikimedia Commons with subtitles but are probably easiest to find in the right order on this listing page on Meta. You can also find them in your regular podcast player; try searching for “Wikipediapodden”. On the podcast website, they are all tagged with the Wikimedia Futures Lab tag and can be found there.

If you would like to subscribe to the podcast, you should know that the weekly episodes are in Swedish. However, on the website there is a tag for the episodes in English so if you have a podcast player that support regular feeds you should be able to just copy this feed link and import it to get only the English episodes straight to your listening queue.

Enjoy your listening!