Call for Advisory Board Members

Greetings reliable & underrepresented knowledge sources enthusiasts!

We are Diego de la Hera and Scann, longtime friends and collaborators in several open knowledge projects. Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation awarded us a grant to develop Web2Cit: Visual Editor for Citoid Web Translators. The product that will be developed through this grant is a visual editor that allows non-technical users to improve Citoid’s ability to add references to Wikipedia articles. The aim of the project is to widen the coverage of underrepresented sources in Wikipedia.

Now, as we start moving with this project, we are putting together an advisory board that will help us build sustainability and community involvement for this project. This is an open call for volunteers that want to help us think through some critical aspects of the project and overall help us steward it to its current and future success.

How many people are we looking for? Around 10-12 people who have at least four spare hours or so every month to engage with us and provide us with advice, ideas and feedback.

Who are we looking for? We have several profiles in mind, but here’s a non-exhaustive list of the type of profiles we are looking for. We also acknowledge that some profiles might actually fit in an intersection!

Technical profiles: people experienced or interested in: open source software development, including software architecture and modelling, automatic software testing, continuous integration, project management, UX/UI, Git; web development, including JavaScript/React frontend development, Python/Node.js backend development, RESTful APIs, OAuth; web-related technologies, including web proxying, web scraping, semantic web and metadata standards, web annotation, XPath selection; Wikimedia technologies, including Mediawiki, Wikipedia User scripts and gadgets, Wikipedia citation templates, Toolforge, Phabricator, Gerrit, Translatewiki; and Citoid/Zotero translators.
Community profiles: people with knowledge, experience or willingness to learn more about Wikipedia and particularly about sources; people passionate about languages and underrepresented sources of knowledge; people with a passion to communicate in different ways and involve community members into interesting projects; heavy-users of different types of sources in one or more languages.
Future-proof profiles: people with experience in building reliable, long-term sustainable software projects; people with experience, knowledge or interest in funding, long-term sustainability, or with the ability to connect us with funding partners or partner institutions that could steward the project once our cycle of funding is completed.

The advisory board will strive to find a gender and geographically and underrepresented knowledge balance. If you are not sure if your profile will fit but you are interested in joining the Advisory Board, please apply!

What does the work entail? We don’t have yet a full exhaustive list of responsibilities and activities, but here’s a preliminary idea of what the activities might be:

Participate in a call every once in a while (probably every six-seven weeks), only if you feel comfortable.
Help us design the early stages of the project.
Provide feedback as necessary and according to your own experience through different channels (emails, surveys, 1:1 calls as needed).
Help us promote the project in different ways and in different communities.
...and any other way you find useful!

How many hours do I have to commit and for how long? Since this is a volunteer role, we will make sure to lift all the boring, time-consuming tasks out of your shoulders, and give you only things to do that you will enjoy! We estimate that overall you won’t be spending more than 4 hours a month. We expect the work of the Advisory Board to kick-off in August/September 2021 and finalize in July 2022, when the project is due.

What’s in it for me? We are open to having different levels of expertise in this Advisory Board. In any case, here’s what we will give in exchange:

The opportunity to participate in the early stages of a fun project with amazing people to solve an interesting problem!
A certificate of participation where needed.
A recognition in the different presentation pages of the project (Meta, Wikimedia repository, slideshow presentations, etc.) with your name listed as part of the Advisory Board.
A barnstar in your Wikipedia page! Because who doesn’t love a barnstar?

I can’t participate right now. Will there be any more opportunities later? YES! We want to make this as open to collaboration and participation as possible. If you are unable to participate in this call, we will be issuing some other calls for participation later in the project.

Note: Everyone in this Advisory Board will have to abide by the Wikimedia Friendly Space Policy.

If you are interested, please fill in this form. Deadline for applying: 9th August, 2021. We will be in touch soon after the deadline for applications closes!