On October 27th the Demo Day of the UNLOCK Accelerator 2022 took place as a hybrid event. All seven project teams showcased the solutions they had been working on over the past four months. The event was hosted by our partners Impact Hub Belgrade and Wikimedia Serbia, and it was the first time over the course of the program that we left the virtual screen and got together in person!
The Demo Day takes place once a year at the end of each program edition. At this big showcase event, the participants demonstrate their prototypes to a live audience and receive valuable feedback. It is a chance to get a very first glimpse of what the teams have been working on and offer insights as the teams set out to make a lasting impact on our knowledge society. This offers great opportunities to find inspiration, build motivation and make lasting connections. Together, we also take the time to celebrate the participants’ achievements.
For a 4-month period, the participants worked hard to develop prototypes that offer concrete and scalable solutions to this year’s challenge “Access to knowledge is a matter of equity”; open-source solutions that break down social and technical barriers preventing people from both accessing and contributing to free knowledge.
At Wikimedia, we strongly believe in the power of free knowledge for social impact. Therefore, all project results that are developed throughout the accelerator program are openly licensed: all projects must be open source (as an open software project) or run under a free license (as a freely licensed non-technical project, e.g. art, audio, video, etc.)
Seven products were developed throughout the accelerator in 2022. Among them are: A platform that safeguards indigenous knowledge on biodiversity in the Amazon; a tool that offers support in translating politically sensitive terms; a browser extension providing user-generated audio descriptions to the visually impaired; and many more.
Here they are:
Each of the seven participating teams only had 5 minutes to demo their prototypes to a live audience. The presentations were followed by 6 minutes of Q&A from our panel of experts:
Each panel member offered valuable feedback, lending their expertise and a critical perspective to the teams as they embark on a journey to enrich the Free Knowledge ecosystem and make a positive mark on our society. The goal was to better understand the working models and potentials of the products, and maybe even some of their risks.
