Community Liaison

Overview

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Community Liaison, whose main responsibilities will be handling community communications and engagement within the Structured Data on Commons project. This project will develop technical capacity for storing structured data for media files on the media repository Wikimedia Commons, and will include development of features which allow media to be easier to view, translate, search, edit, curate and use.  The project relies on the same technology as the one used for Wikidata, Wikibase.

Community Liaisons play a vital role within product development, bridging the communities and product teams during the product development life-cycle. For this specific project, you will also collaborate with product and technology teams from our sister organization, Wikimedia Deutschland. As a CL, you will support product direction and feature decision-making by incorporating broad community perspectives into technical decisions, as well as holding dialogues with users about the scope, pace and features of upcoming changes to Wikimedia projects, beyond the Structured Data project and after it ends.  You will ensure that collaboration is cohesive and productive, not being a replacement for direct communication between a product team and communities, but handling the heavy lifting of communication and collaboration processes.

You will be part of the Technical Collaboration team, whose goal is helping developers build features in collaboration with our communities. TC supports the Foundation’s Product and Technology teams, volunteer developers, tech ambassadors, and other contributors who want to get involved in the planning, development, and deployment of Wikimedia software features.

We’d like you to do these things:

• Work with the Structured Data team to plan and implement community collaboration from project inception to development and roll-out as part of the related grant
• Engage communities in the software development process by acting as a conduit for questions, bug reports and feature requests
• Assist community leaders in adopting and spreading the use of new tools among the wider community
• Increase awareness with contributors about the ongoing work, how they can participate effectively and reuse the outcomes for their own projects; this includes partners like Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (“GLAM”)  and volunteer developers
• Monitor Commons/Wikidata on emerging issues about software product, with the assistance of volunteers
• Ensure that communities are represented in decision-making within WMF software projects

We’d like you to have these skills:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in a related field, for example, Library and Information Science, Museum Studies, Digital Humanities, Data Analysis or Computer Science
• Minimum of 2 years of related work or volunteering experience
• Strong verbal and written proficiency with the English language
• Excellent diplomatic people skills; ability to interact with technical and non-technical people and to represent communities both internally and externally
• Ability to explain complex engineering projects/products to a diverse audience with different levels of technical understanding, particularly data and metrics, and privacy matters
• A self-motivated attitude is needed to conceive and execute communication plans for product in development

And it would be even more awesome if you have:

• Experience using and contributing to Wikimedia projects, particularly Commons and Wikidata
• Diverse language skills is a major plus. The Wikimedia movement is multilingual, so we aim to be able to communicate with our different communities natively
• Familiarity with Wikimedia GLAMs projects and related user groups’ workflows
• Connections or familiarity with open source community developers working on GLAM, linked open data or Multimedia 
• Strong knowledge of the dynamics of online community interaction and communication
• Experience with the software development process, particularly Agile and Kanban

Wikimedia Foundation is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We also welcome remote and international applicants across all timezones.