SMWConTalk2019-09

Hello everybody. I´m Maria. Yesterday, when I arrived here, I did not know that I will talk today.

This year our company BITPlan is one of the sponsors of this conference

and we are happy to do this.

It is just like inviting our friends for dinner.

In the next 6 minutes I am going to cover three topics.

For all three I will tell you my own experience.

⌘⌘ Transporting Bikes by Train[edit]

Our location here is the UIC the International Federation of railways.

We are happy to stay here, becouse we often travel by train.

I have bad knees and I can't properly walk any more.

So we bought us pedelecs. This helps me to do lang biketrips.

In the last two years we have been riding 5.000 km with our bikes.

Our bike tours we have documented on the website ebike.bitplan.com

That website is a semantic mediawiki site.

Wolfgang has prepared the templates for it

and I love to fill the Websites with documents and fotos.

This year we created a special page on transporting bikes.

As you can see in the different pictures every country has different standards.

In Germany and Czechoslovakia the transport is most simple and comfortable.

In countries like France things get difficult - in Sweden it's almost impossible to transport bikes.

If the UIC helps improve the situation internationally, than we can visit more places with our bikes.

That will be great.

⌘⌘ #11Dollar4Climate[edit]

Lets continue with the next topic.

We have initiated the #11Dollar4Climate idea.

You find it on twitter and github.

You need 11 dollars.

Pick a Good organization, which is doing something good for climate to get 10 dollar.

Pick a Bad person to get 1 dollar.

In two letters you send your donation.

And a note, that you explain why the bad person doesn't get the other 10 dollar.

For example:

I love the musik from Sting.

So I liked to start that we send 10 Dollar to the

Sting's rainforest foundation.

The president of Brazil got 1 Dollar.

It felt good to think what the president of Brazil would think

about investing one dollar for fighting the rainforrest fires.

The whole thing is not so much about money

but sending out the 2 sided message.

Some people need to be stopped to do what they are doing right now

and others need support!

We want to make sure that our children and grandchildren survive the climate change with an intact planet.

Obviously 11 dollar is not much - but with your own ideas you can also do something.

⌘⌘ Marketing in a non-profit organisation[edit]

The third and last topic is marketing.

Yesterday Richard proposed the marketing for

Semantic Mediawiki should be professionalized.

Wolfgang and I have experience with the non profit organization iSAQB:

the International Software Architecture Qualification Board.

That organization is very successfull since it was founded 10 years ago.

Over 15.000 people have gotten an iSAQB certificate in the meantime.

By the way if you'd like to get

one of those certificate just give me a call and I'll explain

why it is so much fun to attend a course with BITPlan ...

From my personal experience as a secretary of that organization

the core marketing success factor is: People.

See how the ISAQB is listing it's members.

It is also planned to have a list of all those 15.000 attendees

and make sure the Alumni happily promote the association.

For SMW Wolfgang and I took the same approach.

For quite a few years we made sure that every attendee

get's his personal page in the semantic mediawiki of SMW.

This way word of mouth can be spread.

Otto Rehagel, a soccer trainer once said:

Money does not kick goals.

As a fan of Borussia Mönchengladbach, a german soccer team

I can tell you how true this is. Its nice to see Borussia playing Celtic Glasgow

If you want to be successfull with a limited budget

it is very important to value volunteer and unpaid work.

Of course investing money still makes sense.

But never every take the approach of a row boat with only one rower and 8 people shouting commands.