Projekt:Podcast/Avsnitt 350
Avsnitt 350
Inspelningsdatum: 1 februari 2026
Publiceringsdatum: 10 februari 2026
Lyssna:
Extern länk: https://wikipediapodden.se/wikimedia-futures-lab-claudia-garad-350/
Programanteckningar
Programledare är Jan Ainali.
Special episode
This is the ninth episode in a series of ten short interviews recorded at the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt. In this episode, recorded on day three, we meet Claudia Garád, the Executive Director of Wikimedia Österreich and board member of Wikimedia Europe.
Transcript
Welcome to Wikipediapodden and this series of interviews from the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt, the last weekend of January 2026. My name is Jan Ainali. Here we will meet participants, panelists and organizers to give you an idea of what happened at the lab. The interviews took place over three days, with the first one just before it started and the last just after the closing ceremony. So you will get to gauge where the attendees were at each point in time. This is the ninth interview out of ten recorded on day three.
Hi, I'm Claudia Garád. I'm executive director of Wikimedia Austria and currently also serve on the board of Wikimedia Europe. And I'm here a bit with both hats on, both perspectives.
What made you want to come to the Wikimedia Futures Lab?
Firstly, I think I was lacking spaces to have really productive conversations with other Wikimedians. So for a while there hasn't been something like we used to have, like Wikimedia Summits, where people with very similar tasks in the movement came together to strategize. There are a lot of community-focused events, which is good. But because I'm working a bit more on the meta level, I was missing the spaces where we can have really productive meta discussions as well. And so that was a bit of a feeling that this alone would make me happy, because we are going through a strategy process at Wikimedia Austria at the moment, or we just finished it actually at Wikimedia Europe. We still added and just getting out of this little soup in Europe and test some of the hypothesis we had with like a bigger group and people with different perspective. And that alone made it worthwhile coming here already, like no matter what else will be the outcome of the conference. I found that really enriching and helpful.
We had the luxurious pleasure here to hear external speakers and internal speakers talking about the trends happening around content, about how our content is being consumed and how the contributors are doing. Is there anything of what we heard here that sort of resonated really well with your personal experience from back home?
There were several things. I really liked these lightning talks and panels with people who are close enough to us to understand, I think, where we are, but still bring fresh outside perspectives. So one interesting piece was the research that highlighted that what we're actually experiencing, that the wikis who were really open in the beginning and everybody could just come and edit along, became more closed in the sense that we need to defend ourselves more and more. Like the more popular and successful we got, the more we need to defend ourselves from vandalism or people who are trying to influence our projects in malign ways. That this kind of caution that our community has is like very natural and comes basically with the success. And now that we are more under fire than ever before and at the same time need to fight more than ever before to find newcomers, that this is a bit of a dilemma we are in that is backed by research and data and it's not just anecdotal stories. So that I found really helpful. Then I'm also very interested in the whole conversation of how we can make the comments more sustainable. There are very different perspectives in the movement around that and I still haven't made up my mind on the topic. So that was also very interesting to hear people from Creative Commons, from Open Future, but also people who are still very much settled in our principles that we had 20 years ago and like having different perspectives on the matter and helping me form my own thoughts. So these were the two things that I found most interesting, I think.
Yeah, and to clarify for our listeners, we've talked about the digital commons in general as well, because now you didn't mean the Wikimedia Commons.
No, no, yeah, the digital commons, like the wider open movement.
Yes, we had sort of like three days with themes. The first day was learning and yesterday was thinking, today are we doing? How is this process of churning our way through this feel to you?
It feels very inspiring, but also a little bit overwhelming. Like I already realized yesterday at the end of day two that my mental capacity was a bit exploited. But I knew that from former conferences, like two days is a good time where you can still have conversations and learn new things and take in stuff. And then at some point I think you need to have a little break. But we have a very interesting group today. When we come to the doing session in the beginning, I was a bit concerned that my brain would not be fresh enough for any group work, but I think we have a very motivated group and a good topic about the sustainability of the wider open movement and came up with the idea of defining health criteria. A bit like the climate goal of 1.5 percent, like something that speaks to people, where we say like, you know, these are things that we want to work towards as the wider open movement, but we might also find other partners or even big tech willing to commit to help us to not reach a certain breaking point. So this is a very interesting discussion that revitalized me to a certain extent.
Perhaps the final question, this conference has been about very much generating ideas, not making decisions, but putting out things that we could try. What do you want to send along to people who are not joining the conference and didn't have the pleasure to go through the process but might see some of the ideas popping out? Is there something you want to send to them to bring into the reading of it?
I think all the groups would profit from more perspectives and people willing to help. Like, actually, this is one of my concerns. Will there be enough ownership to actually drive them forward? So we certainly don't need fewer people, but more people to join. So I hope and have full confidence in the organizing team of the conference that they will find a digestible way to present our results and then look through the results and see what sparks joy and interest and reach out. Yeah, I mean, Wikimania in Europe is coming up. So for people who live around here, that might be a good way to meet, but also in online spaces to work on it. I'm certainly happy to hear other thoughts on how we can sustain our movement in the long run.
All right. Thank you, Claudia, for joining the podcast and enjoy the last hours of the conference.
Thank you, Jan.
This was the ninth interview out of ten. When all are published, you will find them on Wikimedia Commons, both in the Wikimedia Futures Lab and Wikipediapodden categories. And, of course, on Wikipediapodden.se under the Wikimedia Futures Lab tag. There you can also find other episodes in English.