Joining the Wikibase Stakeholder Group

[Antonin Delpeuch (lists)]

Hello all,

Our steering committee member Lozana and her team over at Rhizome are
planning to launch a Wikibase Stakeholder Group "to pool resources
together to fund new work required on Wikibase, and attendant toolchain,
i.e. including OpenRefine." Do you think we should be part of that, as
the OpenRefine project?

Personally I think it would be great - this would be a really useful
structure to carry out projects that are outside OpenRefine's scope but
are beneficial to our Wikibase integration in general.

Best,

Antonin

[Thad Guidry]

Hi Antonin,

What resources get pooled?

It seems this is Rhizome simply asking us to join a group they happened to name Wikibase Stakeholder Group, which has no affiliation to Wikimedia Foundation?

And the idea is that having multiple parties on some grant is sometimes beneficial when applying for some grant?

Who carries out projects outside of OpenRefine's scope?

Volunteer Developers who might be interested?

That statement means it might not align well if it is outside of our scope?  Since this email is to our Dev mailing list, does it mean development scope and roadmap?  Is that what you were referring to with "scope"?

Thad

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/

https://calendly.com/thadguidry/

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[Antoine Beaubien]

I think It's a very good idea. It will get attention/funding towards OR.

Regards,

   Antoine

[Lozana Rossenova]

Hi Thad,

Perhaps I can jump in and answer some of these concerns.

My answers are in purple below your questions:

What resources get pooled?

>> Joint funding grants primarily. 

It seems this is Rhizome simply asking us to join a group they happened to name Wikibase Stakeholder Group, which has no affiliation to Wikimedia Foundation?

>> Rhizome have a long history of collaborating with Wikimedia Germany. Rhizome's Wikibase is one of the first Wikibases in the wild (since 2015) and we have been talking to Wikidata developers and submitting phabricator tickets since then. In 2018 Rhizome and Wikimedia co-organized a series of in-person events / hackathons / conferences out of which the current Wikibase user community (Telegram chat, etc) emerged. However we have always been aware that there is a need for more coordinated work. Last year we started discussions with the product managers at Wikimedia Germany around how we envision the future evolution of the product. Wikimedia have always been very open that they do not have capacity to meet all the needs of the Wikibase community, as their resources are limited and need to focus on internal (i.e. Wikidata) projects primarily. There is actually already one other group interested in doing similar work which was started by IFLA, also not affiliated with WMF. But the IFLA group is very narrowly focused on libraries. Our WBSG idea is to have a membership group which focuses on both research institutions and GLAMs and to be more directly working on new extensions needed to make WIkibase work within these institutions, as we've done in the past when developing new extensions, all work will be coordinated with Wikimedia Germany to make sure it's compatible with mainline development, but we will not expect Wikimedia Germany to include or maintain all the extensions we build, on the contrary WBSG will be responsible for maintenance, hence the need for some more formal structure. We plan to make everything a bit more official, once we set up a website and a roadmap, we invited OpenRefine early in a way, before we've gone public, since Rhizome facilitated a few funding calls recently with Antonin and Martin and we felt there is potential for OpenRefine to be affiliated in some way.

And the idea is that having multiple parties on some grant is sometimes beneficial when applying for some grant?

>> Yes, based on recent calls mentioned above, we believe there's better chances if the parties applying are a bit more varied than a single open source project, value for many funders is particularly placed on scholarly / educational / social justice components of applications. We think several partners applying around a specific project which may also involve software development of e.g. specific extension gets better chance to get that work funded.

Who carries out projects outside of OpenRefine's scope?

>> WBSG includes institutions with in-house development teams, which can contribute work hours too, but for very specific work the group pools resources to hire developers with expertise in e.g. Wikibase, or OpenRefine.

Volunteer Developers who might be interested?

>> Possibly, yes, but depends on level of experience. 

That statement means it might not align well if it is outside of our scope?  Since this email is to our Dev mailing list, does it mean development scope and roadmap?  Is that what you were referring to with "scope"?

>> I think Antonin might be better placed to answer this actually.

I hope this covers most of the concerns, but let me know if there's anything else that's not clear / you have doubts about.

Cheers,

Lozana

--

Lozana Rossenova

PhD Researcher in Digital Archives Curation

London South Bank University / Rhizome

centreforthestudyof.net / rhizome.org

[Antonin Delpeuch (lists)]

Thanks Lozana for the thorough explanations!

Thad, in addition to that, here is a bit more background about what I meant by "outside the scope of OR".

As you know, our Wikibase integration does not only rely on functionality implemented in OpenRefine itself or its Wikibase extension: we also rely on other services: of course the Wikibase instance itself, but also the associated reconciliation service, and EditGroups in the case of Wikidata. Those services are not developed as part of the OpenRefine project itself (at least, so far they have lived outside of our GitHub organization). But we have an interest in keeping those alive, since we rely on them. Also we have had the long-term project of getting rid of the reconciliation service as a wrapper and instead getting Wikibase itself to implement the API directly. So far we have seen little interest from Wikimedia Deutschland or Wikimedia Foundation to tackle that themselves. So this is precisely why I think it would be great to have the Wikibase Stakeholder Group: this would be an ideal structure for such projects.

Best,

Antonin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openrefine-dev/CACz%3DpnaKGKCZFmd9%2BHgmYLmJ2_DbkXm3G%3DZe2yqDU3-ZGmx3PA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Martin Maginier]

Thanks for all the details Lozana and Antonin.

Practically, are we looking at individuals being member of both organization? Or is it something more formal, where OpenRefine Org will nominate representative(s) to the Wikibase Stakeholder Group?

Martin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openrefine-dev/f6309e80-508d-89cd-9e60-661afa73de1f%40antonin.delpeuch.eu.

[Antonin Delpeuch (lists)]

So unless there are any unresolved points here, I'd say that OpenRefine
can join the WSG as a project, right?

Best,
Antonin

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>>> --
>>> Lozana Rossenova
>>> PhD Researcher in Digital Archives Curation
>>> London South Bank University / Rhizome
>>> centreforthestudyof.net

>>> <http://www.centreforthestudyof.net/> / rhizome.org <http://rhizome.org/>

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[Thad Guidry]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 2:05 PM Antonin Delpeuch (lists) <li...@antonin.delpeuch.eu> wrote:

So unless there are any unresolved points here, I'd say that OpenRefine
can join the WSG as a project, right?

Best,
Antonin

I would say OK to join.

I assume you, Antonin, would be our representative?

I also assume if you needed help or had questions from myself, Martin, or generally the Steering Committee or CS&S, that you would reach out?