Annual Report 2025/Fail fest: Overview and structure in the Hub work

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Use

Community

Enabling

Access

2025

In this fail fest, we take a closer look at the Content Partnerships Hub, our initiative to establish an organization within the international movement that brings together expertise, structure, materials, and documentation for content partnerships with different kinds of organisations, for example in the cultural heritage sector, the education sector, or among international organizations. The aim is to make it easier for Wikimedia organizations, user groups, and individual volunteers around the world to establish partnerships with organizations that create and steward knowledge. The project received pilot funding from the Wikimedia Foundation for one year, with the main part of the work taking place in 2026.

The Content Partnerships Hub has long existed as an idea and as an initiative from Wikimedia Sverige. In 2025, the association, together with several other Wikimedia organizations, applied to jointly scale up the initiative and share the work. The time available to complete the project application to the Wikimedia Foundation was extremely limited, and the entire application was developed in only a few weeks, including the meeting held in Berlin where the participating organizations came together to agree to apply for funding. The application process coincided with the onboarding of the new Chief Operating Officer, who, once the application had been approved, also came to serve as the project manager. It quickly became clear that the combination of a complex project that had evolved over many years and changed priorities and forms several times, together with a newly appointed project manager, was a demanding mix.

• The participants in the Content Partnerships Hub project in the pilot phase 2025-2026.
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Some parts that the Hub project team had been working on for several years were inadequately documented, and some of the project goals were not clearly formulated. The fact that the initiative had developed over a number of years with very limited resources had also meant that the division of roles, tasks, and responsibilities was partly unclear and not clearly described in the grant application that was approved. In addition, some of the Content Partnerships Hub's main components were not funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, which created further uncertainty about what was expected from the different partners in the project.

After the Wikimedia Foundation approved the pilot application, an intensive phase began in which the Executive Director and the project manager reviewed a number of older documents, minutes, and communications, both with project partners and with the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to develop a clear project plan. The fact that documentation was sometimes missing led to goals and visions being questioned and revisited in discussion. It was a demanding period, but in the end it allowed us to formulate a sharper vision for the project and to build a project organization in which the division of roles was not only clear to the project manager, but also broadly anchored across the entire project team.

There are two lessons from this period. First, we need to become better at formulating clear project goals even for projects where funding and timelines are uncertain, and time for establishing the project structure needs to be explicitly built into the project plan when dealing with complex projects involving many different actors. Since the operational start of the Hub was delayed, we will apply for an extension of the project, and there is a very good chance that this will be approved.

Second, the establishment of the Content Partnerships Hub was in itself a valuable task for the new Chief Operating Officer. Through this project, they had to review the vision, familiarise themselves with the project goals, and immediately begin collaborating with a number of international Wikimedia organisations. It was an intense introduction to the movement's different organisational forms, structures, and challenges. By the end of 2025, the organisation, goals, and division of roles within the Content Partnerships Hub were clear to all participants, and we are convinced that the project will deliver very strong results in the coming year.