Partners
From Open Progress
An organisation defines itself by its people and by the people and organisations it works with. Open Progress is very much a child of its time and many of our initial instincts are the result of being part of the Wikimedia Foundation as well as finding a need for a separate organisation. It was fortunate that GerardM made the initial contact with Kennisnet for the WMF; it resulted in the first official partnership. It demonstrated how important, how mutually beneficial a partnership can be.
Because of the nature of what was once WiktionaryZ now OmegaWiki the strategy to get content for the project can be much different from a Wikipedia project. Many organisations maintain large thesauri, word lists. These resources prove to be really valuable but also very expensive to maintain. OmegaWiki provides the opportunity to collaborate on these resources. The initial data that we made available was to demonstrate that we could have relational data in a Wiki environment. The Gemet thesaurus of EIONET demonstrated this well.
[edit] What is a partner
A partner is an organisation that shares a mutual vision on the need for collaboration in our projects. It does involve itself in the maintenance of data and it shares the responsibility of ensuring the sustainability of our organisation and our projects.
[edit] Partners of Open Progress
We have been working together with several organisations for quite some time. Kennisnet provided us with the initial funding for OmegaWiki. With the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg we have been working together on the development of functionality for the Destinazione Italia project. With Hivos we have been working on the creation of content for Wikipedias.
The biggest impact however has been our partnering with Knewco on OmegaWiki. Knewco learned about our project from Jimmy Wales and when we met, they already had a concept of having a community of scientists work together. For Knewco it was a big shift to embrace the Wiki model and the result is a collaboration that is truly symbiotic. OmegaWiki is truly free; the software is licensed under the GPL and the data is GFDL and CC-by. There will be additional functionality provided by Knewco that will be provided for free and that will create a positive feedback loop of data into OmegaWiki.
[edit] Acknowledging our partners
As partners are essential to our success, we are happy to acknowledge our partners on the Open Progress projects that they have involved themselves in. On OmegaWiki we have reserved room under our logo. We may get more projects and, when we do we will be happy to explain why partnering works for us.
