Wikimedia Futures Lab/Program

In-person event in Frankfurt: January 30 – February 1 2026

Program description

The Futures Lab in Frankfurt will bring together affiliates, volunteer contributors, and experts to deepen our understanding of the impacts these global trends may have on our communities, our projects, and our shared mission — and to develop a broad range of hypotheses and experiments that can drive new insight and action.

Participants will draw on expert perspectives, internal knowledge, and data to explore questions such as:

How will the spread of AI impact human-generated content across the internet, now and over the next 5 years?
Where and how will people find information on the internet, now and over the next 5 years?
What are contributors across the internet looking for, and how might that change in the next 5 years?

At the conclusion of the Futures Lab, participants will generate a set of testable hypotheses and a portfolio of “safe-to-try” experiments that can be run locally and shared across the movement to accelerate collective learning. The three day in person event in Frankfurt will be part of a wider process to discuss the trends affecting the Wikimedia movement.

Schedule

Please note that this draft schedule is a work in progress and that the content of the session blocks might still change. The start and end times for each day, however, won't change.

Thursday, Jan 29 6pm – Get-together organized by local communities

Wikipedians from Frankfurt invite the Futures Lab participants to a „Stammtisch“ on Thursday evening before the event. A „Stammtisch“ is a get-together, where Wikipedians meet informally in a restaurant or café to eat and drink together. Unlike an edit-a-thon, where the focus is on working on articles, a Stammtisch is about getting to know each other personally. In Germany, such Wikipedia Stammtische have been held in many larger cities for many years.

The Stammtisch will take place at Restaurant Lilium (address: 60487 Frankfurt-Bockenheim, Leipziger Straße 4, in the backyard). The local organizers look forward to meeting you. To help them plan and reserve a table, please add your user name to the list here.

Friday, Jan 30 — LEARN Notes
09:00 –10:00	Registration
10:00 – 10:30	Welcome + Futures Lab Opening
10:30 – 10:45	Collectively Defining the Future of Knowledge - Keynote presentation Malka Older, Executive Director of Global Voices and science-fiction author.
10:45 - 11:30	Content and AI: Panel Discussion + Audience Q&A Alek Tarkowski, Strategy Director of Open Future Foundation and Board Member of Wikimedia Europe Bettina Warburg, investor, researcher, and speaker on Web3, blockchain and emerging technologies Jason Tuohey, Editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica Max Senges, Professor for Entrepreneurship at the University of the Arts Berlin and Entrepreneur in Residence at Entrepreneurship Foundation
11:30 – 12:30	Breakout Sessions: Small group discussions on content + consumer trends and implications for Wikimedia. How are these content + AI shifts showing up in your region, project, or local context? What might the implications of these shifts be for the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement?
12:45 – 14:00	Lunch
14:00 – 14:15	Wikimedia Lightning Talks: Consumers + Re-Use, Content Global Trends, Maryana Pinchuk Changes in internet traffic, Selena Deckelman Insights on Awareness and Trust, Anusha Alikhan - the slides presented were from Wave 7 and Wave 8. The full presentation on brand health can be found here.
14:15 – 15:00	Consumers and Reuse: Panel Discussion + Audience Q&A Bourree Lam, Executive Editor of Nothing Personal at the Mozilla Foundation Gerard Crichlow, Global Social Strategy Director at McCann World Group Jonathan Flesher, VP Business Development at Reddit Michael Sun, culture editor and writer at The Guardian
15:00 – 16:00	Breakout Sessions: Small group discussions on consumers + re-use insights and implications for Wikimedia. How are these consumer trends showing up in your region, project, or local context? What might the implications of this shift be for the Wikimedia projects and Wikimedia movement?
16:00 – 16:30	Break
16:30 – 17:20	Hypothesis Workshop: Small group sessions to generate potential responses to content + consumer trends. How could the Wikimedia movement respond to the content + consumer shifts we’ve been exploring today?
17:20 – 17:30	Closing
19:00 – 22:00	Dinner at the event venue Self-organized meetups
Saturday, Jan 31 — THINK Notes
09:00 – 10:00	Registration
10:00 – 10:20	Opening
10:20 – 10:40	Wikimedia Lightning Talk: Knowledge Contribution From attention to participation: what the contributor funnel is telling us, Kadeem Khan How Wikidata contributions are used outside the Wiki world, Raja Amelung
10:40 – 11:25	Knowledge Contributors: Panel Discussion + Audience Q&A Benjamin Mako Hill, social scientist and technologist at the University of Washington and long-time Wikimedian Daniel Sigge, Programs Manager at TikTok and new German Wikipedia community member Nathan Matias, assistant professor at the Cornell University Departments of Communication and Information Science Sofia Ongele, developer, content creator and Director of Strategy at Gen-Z for Change
11:35 – 12:45	Breakout Sessions: Small group discussions on contribution insights and implications for Wikimedia. How are these contributor shifts showing up in your region, project, or local context? What might the implications of these shifts be for the Wikimedia projects and Wikimedia movement?
12:45 – 14:00	Lunch and group photo (13:40)
14:00 – 14:25	Shifts in Information Sharing: The Future of the Open: Keynote presentation Sarah Pearson, General Counsel at Creative Commons
14:30 – 15:30	Hypothesis Workshop: Small group sessions to generate potential responses to contribution trends How could the Wikimedia movement respond to the contribution shifts we’ve been exploring today?
15:30 – 15:45	Break
15:45 – 17:30	Hypothesis Exchange + Heatmap Full group exercise to review hypotheses and identify where to focus energy + attention on Day 3 Which of our hypotheses do you feel most energized to focus on during Day 3? Where should we focus our experimentation?
19:00 – 00:00	Dinner and social event (external location*): Wikipedia 25th Birthday Celebration
Sunday, Feb 1 — DO Notes
09:00 – 10:00	Registration
10:00 – 10:30	Opening Fireside Chat: Adjusting to Global Trends Udbhav Tiwari, VP Strategy and Global Affairs at Signal
10:30 – 10:45	How to Design a Good Experiment - Some examples of experiments happening within Wikimedia Adventures in Experiment Design: Two Way Doors, Marshall Miller Wikidata in the AI Web, Jonathan Fraine
10:50 – 12:15	Experiment Workshops: Small group sessions to design safe to try ways to test emerging hypotheses What deliberate, ’safe to try’ experiment could you try to test one of these hypotheses?
12:00 – 13:30	Lunch
13:30 – 15:15	Experiment Refinement and Activation Planning: Self-organized small groups will refine their experiments and develop action plans What actions will be needed for you to put your experiment in motion? How will you share the results with this group and the broader? Wikimedia movement?
15:15 – 16:00	Futures Lab Closing
16:00 – 20:00	Post-conference program Please note that the number of seats is limited. Sign up here if you're interested in joining.
16:15 – 17:30	Frankfurt City tour
17:30 – 20:00	Wikimania 2005 site visit and reception Short documentary about Wikimania 2005 shown during the reception.

* For security reasons, we won't publicly disclose the venues where the conference and side events will take place. All locations are located in the city center.