Get to know the projects selected for UNLOCK 2022
It was a pleasure and a difficult task at once selecting the top project teams that will fill the seven slots available in the Wikimedia Accelerator UNLOCK 2022. Let us introduce them to you!
Looking back, June was a particularly exciting month at the UNLOCK Accelerator. We received applications from 34 project teams and 104 persons based in 12 different countries; all with an exciting idea on how to make the access to knowledge more equitable!
It was a pleasure and a difficult task at once selecting the top project teams that will fill the seven slots available in the Wikimedia Accelerator UNLOCK. But with our amazing jury by our side we felt well supported and made some amazing choices!
The teams not only had good ideas, but were also able to convince us of why they need our support, how well they work together as a team and how they would benefit from our coaching and a scholarship.
We suspect that you too are eager to hear about the projects we will be supporting in their quest of turning ideas into working prototypes and MVPs.
So without any further ado, here they are:
- activist.org – an open source platform that breaks down barriers to becoming politically active and thereby connects people and organizations from different social and activist movements
- Game of political participation – encouraging young people in the Western Balkans to familiarize themselves with political decision making and political systems through elements of gamification
- f[ai]r – establishing an ethics certification for digital applications through a holistic examination of the AI system in the social context, addressing aspects of bias, discrimination, diversity and inclusion
- Inclusio – providing user-generated audio descriptions of visual content to the blind and visually impaired. Ideally the solution could be connected and tested on structured data in Wikimedia Commons
- macht.sprache. – fostering politically sensitive translation through an open source platform that allows for crowdsourcing and discussing politically sensitive terms and their translations, and through a tool to help translate with sensitivity
- MOCI SPACE – a digital space to connect activists, grassroots initiatives and civil society actors in the Western Balkans and that allows for co-creating, publishing and sharing knowledge by making use of the Matrix protocol for federated communication
- P2P Wiki for indigenous wisdom and biodiversity – an open source tool to collect and safeguard indigenous knowledge, and to raise awareness about biodiversity with a P2P offline-first methodology
At the start of the month of July, we virtually launched the official program together with all 24 participants. And in the next four months we will support the teams with coaching, a variety of workshops with experts, regular exchanges and funding. We look forward to working with them in validating and testing their ideas and turning their concepts into functional prototypes!
Stay tuned for updates!
