Jan Ainali

funderingar från mig

Category: Strategi

In the Advisory Committee of OpenRefine

Posted on by Jan Ainali

A couple of weeks back, I joined the Advisory Committee of OpenRefine. I have been a user of OpenRefine for a while, mainly for its superb reconciliation capabilities to Wikidata.

While the name suggests a passive role, the Advisory Committee acts more like a board of trustees in other organizations. As mentioned in the blog post linked above, I hope that my experience from non-profits and grant applications, my recent experience as a codebase steward in the Foundation for Public Code combined by also being an end user might bring something valuable to the table.

💎 Let’s clean up some messy data! 💎

Social Media Aided Support Organization Lesson

Posted on by Jan Ainali

This blog post is part of my course Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy which I previously blogged about here.

Once again, I am having some troubles doing this exercise with my company as a subject. As we are a strict consultant company and don’t sell any products there is no support function at all today, so the question on enhancing the support function gets weird. Instead, as before, I will focus on Wikimedia Sverige and Wikipedia. Wikimedia is initself a support organisation to Wikipedia, which makes this an important function.

Computer-kitten
So firstly, finding engaged users. Luckily there is a list of mentors who have agreed to answer questions, Already a collection of online voluntary support users! Luckily I know a few of them and that they really are power users and that getting them influential would be of great importance. Secondly I would start following their user pages, to be able to chip in with my 2 öre and show them that we care enough to help them too.

There is also the facebook group, but unfortunatly it seems that I am the most active person there, and that I have not had that many possibilities to answer questions.

But there is also some other places to get support right now; questions about Wikipedia, questions about facts and questions about images. And it is very easy to find out who has been most active there (Wikipedia, facts, images).

Splendid! We now have a list of the people who is really helping out on the support side. So what can our strategy be to empower them and what would our strategy be?

Firstly, be active at the places and spaces where the discussion is. Secondly, personally give them credit when credit is due and help them out in the qickest way possible. These are quite obvious. But there is also a point trying to monitor what is said about Wikipedia in Swedish and be bold and answers these questions as soon as possible, or at least point the persons in the right direction. Still this is not so much of a strategy, but more of fixing what is broken today. What would be really helpfull would be a tool, in which a person who wants to know something more could ask for it, without even having to leave Wikipedia or search hard for it.

This is nothing that is technically possible today, but since it is of strategic importance, developers should be put to look into the issue. This is great! We have just found a flaw in our system and also have an idea what would make it better. Even if we sort of knew this already, we had not rationalized about it.

Is there something else that you think we could do better?

Integrated business partner engagement Wikipedia/Wikimedia

Posted on by Jan Ainali
This blog post is part of my course Social Media Strategist at Social Media Academy which I previously blogged about here.

Since I don’t know of any indirect channels my company has, I’ll explore another interest of mine, Wikipedia. Or to be more precise Wikimedia Sverige, the Swedish chapter of Wikimedia foundation, who runs Wikipedia. Here there are probably a lot of indirect channels, but two springs to mind, librarians and teachers. In this excersise I will look into the collaboration with teachers.

 

Aource: "Von Anker bis Zünd, Die Kunst im jungen Bundesstaat 1848 - 1900", Kunsthaus Zürich
The places where we are active is on Facebook, with a group and a fan page, Twitter, our blog and of course Wikipedia. We have a few other accounts which we registered to own the names but that we are not using frequently. (One that we will start to use soon is live streaming video.)

 

So how to figure out who in the discussions are teacher? Luckily I have two people in my network that I knew were teachers Per Falk and Magnus Eriksson which reminded me of a third contact in my network who also os a teacher Kristina Alexandersson.

 

In Facebook their involvment was nothing more than a few likes on our fan page. On Twitter on the other hand their is some more discussion, especially with @kalexandersson who is very active and quite influential. In turn, this reminded me of a university teacher, Mathias Klang, who I recognize from twitter (and IRL) and also has been retweeting @WikimediaSE a few times and he is also influential. But the discussions are scarce, mostly retweeting each other. There is lots of room on improvement from our side here.
Looking for Kristina’s pages and groups on Facebook gives no good leads, but Magnus leads to Mittuniversitet, a university grop, which however has no discussions at all. Per Falk’s facebook profile leads me to Pedagogiskt Café – inspirationsplats för pedagoger i Stockholm which right now doesn’t have any interesting discussions for us but could be a lead with a fair amount of followers.

 

In Kristina’s LinkedIn, I find that she is a member of Innovative Learning & Education Innovators which could be interesting, however not very specific to Sweden. But it also leads me to her slideshare in which there could be some interesting persons to follow up on. Mathias Klang gives me no leads in LinkedIn and the others I can not find.

 

So what to do now? Firstly investigate my contacts’ contacts further and see if there are any places we are missing out on. Secondly, try to engage them and their friends in discussions, finding out how we can help them in the best way.

 

A hard question I faced was, how to follow discussions about the global phenomenon Wikipedia in Swedish? There is plenty of discussions, mostly in other languages, which is outside our scope since there is plenty of national chapters to share the burden. The only tool I have found is Twazzup.

 

Anyone has any thoughts for that? Oh, and other tip is apprieciated.

Organdonationer

Posted on by Jan Ainali

Jag var iväg på ett seminarium för att fotografera de talande, men det visade sig att det var givande på andra sätt också. Ämnet var “Organdonationer – aktuella dilemman” och trots att alla deltagande hade rätt liknande åsikter fanns det ändå intressanta punkter att samtala om. Ett av dem var hur stark familjens “vetorätt” är, det vill säga inte bara om det inte är känt hur den avlidnas vilja är, för då ska man så klart lyssna på de anhöriga utan även att om de påstår att den avlidne har ändrat uppfattning så lyssnar man på det, oavsett vad man har angivit till donationsregistret.

En annan underlig sak, som de gärna ville se en lagändring på är att man idag inte får ge vård till en person som man vet kommer att avlida i syfte att eventuellt kunna göra en donation oavsett om denne och anhöriga vill att det ska doneras. Det blir extra problematiskt för att man idag är så pass erfaren i sjukvården så att man kan känna igen när ett visst fall är hopplöst på ett ganska tidigt stadium, och de får då inte börja använda respirator för att få tid att kontrollera om transplantation är möjligt.  Ett lite Moment 22 nästan.

Jag själv har ju redan anmält till donationsregistret att jag vill donera (och det borde du också göra) men vill passa på att säga det igen så att alla anhöriga (som råkar läsa min blogg) vet att det är så jag vill ha det.

Och ja, det blev lite bilder också, som vanligt finns de på Wikimedia Commons.

Annika Tibell 1
Annika Tibell.
Foto: Jan Ainali / CC BY-SA 3.0