Annual Report 2023/Civil Society is often Conspicuous By Its Absence when the Public Sector Makes Technical Choices in Respect to Digital Transformation

Access

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Community

Enabling

Access

2023

This fail fest focuses on the fact that Wikimedia Sverige's limited resources have made it impossible for us to be able to contribute fully to the digital transformation process that the public sector is currently undergoing. This transformation encompasses issues such as linked open data, strategic digitization and new digital infrastructures. We get invited to consultations that are often time-consuming and highly specialized, and we are expected to invest our own resources in participating in them. Being invited to contribute is very appreciated and rewarding, and the fact that the public sector has seen the value of what we and other civil society organizations can contribute with is a very positive development. Unfortunately, this arrangement leads to limited opportunities for us and other civil society organizations to participate fully.

Thanks to our work in areas such as linked open data, information dissemination, digitalization and copyright, which has been ongoing for several years, we have established ourselves as an expert instance that is often consulted by other organizations regarding their specific needs. As a result, we now can also see that the public sector has started inviting us to discussions on major strategic choices regarding technology and dissemination of knowledge and information. However, this opportunity is being hampered by the limited resources that civil society has available, meaning that we are not able to contribute as much as we would like. However, the resources we have secured have made it possible for us to do important work with several actors in the public sector. In 2023, our work was focused mainly in these four areas:

The first example of an area where we prioritized our participation was the reference group formed by the Agency for Digital Government (DIGG) to develop a recommendation for persistent identifiers. The target group is mainly systems developers in public administration. This recommendation is part of a larger project, known as Ena, to develop a shared digital infrastructure for administration. The work focused on developing recommendations for the public sector on persistent identifiers, something that is of utmost relevance when the Wikimedia platforms link together different resources via Wikidata and when claims are sourced. We monitored the issue from a reuse perspective, paying special attention to issues such as handling entities that are split, merged or deleted; historically, this has been a major problem for the Wikimedia platforms.

Statistics Sweden is another actor that has shown interest in our work. A couple years ago, they released their data under an open license. Ever since then, one of our workers has been sitting in their user council for communication, which regularly brings together representatives from the media and the public sector to discuss how to better disseminate statistical data to the general public. As a result of this involvement, in the fall of 2023 we were invited to the Statistics Day conference, where we got an opportunity to demonstrate how data from public agencies can be used and enriched on the Wikimedia platforms.

Europeana supports the European cultural heritage sector in their digital transformation and, through its various working groups, produces material that often has a significant impact. The opportunity to get involved in Europeana's working group on Article 14 was therefore very positive, and we contributed, for example, to a mapping of how the article has been implemented at national level in the EU. Wikimedia Sverige worked actively with Article 14 during the implementation of the DSM Directive in Sweden, and the updated law is, from 1 January 2023, one of the broadest implementations in the EU, which is very good news for the digitization of Swedish cultural heritage. The implementation of Article 14 will affect the policy documents of cultural heritage institutions across Europe as the law will force them to make larger parts of their digital material available under free licenses. That's why it's strategically important for us to be able to participate in shaping the supporting documents around this issue in order to fulfill our vision. However, it requires a lot of resources, which we need to try to secure.

However, we were also invited to contribute to discussions in other important areas, where we were not able to participate due to lack of resources and staff. This includes the reference group for the development of a new version of Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH), an aggregator for Swedish cultural heritage data operated by the Swedish National Heritage Board. SOCH has historically been an important resource both for permanent links to data sources and as a resource for facts about and illustrations of Swedish cultural heritage; it has also been a central component of how the content on our country's cultural heritage in the Wikimedia ecosystem, through Kringla, has been made visible together with GLAM institutions' own resources. The Swedish Public Employment Service had a project focused on developing a shared semantics for work tasks and learning, but we were not able to participate in it either, due to lack of resources. It is, of course, both sad and frustrating to have to turn down such opportunities where we were identified as a relevant actor with a potential to contribute.

The lack of resources also means that we have not been able to proactively monitor ongoing initiatives to the extent that we might have wanted. This, together with a lack of resources to invest into visibility and advocacy, has meant that we have missed out on invitations to relevant forums or received them too late to be able to participate meaningfully and in some cases have not been able to prevent unfortunate choices being made. We hope that in 2024, with increased resources for advocacy and communication, we will be taken into consideration in more contexts where we should be contributing. However, long-term strategic work is necessary to secure the resources needed to continue the work even after the project grants we have secured run out.