WikiStage – Bildung im Videoformat? Wessen Schulzeit ähnlich kurz zurück liegt wie meine, wird verstehen, dass das Internet als Quelle eine zweiseitige Medaille ist. Obwohl Fachartikel zu jedem Thema sofort verfügbar sind, fördert deren hochwissenschaftlicher Charakter einen potenziellen Wissensdurst ebenso wenig wie der meist routinierte, trockene Schulunterricht. Auf eine Möglichkeit, Expertenwissen in prägnanter und ansprechender Weise vermittelt zu bekommen, stoße ich erst heute: WikiStage.org ist eine kollaborative Videoplattform, die Bildung interessant gestalten will. Wie das funktioniert, erklärt Johannes Bittel. Herr Bittel, bitte stellen Sie sich einmal kurz vor! Mein Name ist Johannes Bittel, ich komme aus Süddeutschland und bin der Gründer von WikiStage. Nach Abschluss meines Auslandsstudiums habe ich 2013 begonnen, mit meinem Team daran zu arbeiten, ein Netzwerk zum Austausch von Wissen und Ideen zu schaffen.  Wie funktioniert dieses Netzwerk?  Ich glaube, dass heute sehr viele Menschen eine politische Meinung oder fachliches Wissen haben, die sie mit dem Rest der Welt teilen könnten. Dank dem Internet sind wir in der Lage weltweit zu kommunizieren, was uns hier jedoch fehlt, ist eine zentrale Plattform, die die Beiträge bündelt und in einem leicht zugänglichen Format präsentiert. Wir möchten über kurze Videos einen Ideenaustausch ermöglichen an dem jeder teilnehmen kann. Mit welchen Themen befasst sich dieser Austausch? Wir sind ein Netzwerk von Konferenzveranstaltern, die jeweils unabhängig ein Thema für ihre Veranstaltungen wählen. Die Vortragenden geben dann ihre individuelle Perspektive zum jeweiligen Thema in ihrem “WikiTalk”; die Themenwahl erfolgt also durch die einzelnen Mitwirkenden.  Besonders populär sind aktuell etwa Unternehmertum, Kreativität und Glück, Beiträge zu Jazz oder Napoleon sind allerdings ebenso gefragt.  Was unterscheidet WikiStage von anderen Videoplattformen? WikiStage dient als globale Diskussionsplattform, die es ermöglicht, kostenlos Wissen und Meinungen im direkten Austausch zu diskutieren und damit demokratische Debatten nicht nur in Parlamenten, sondern auf Ebene der Bürger stattfinden zu lassen. Im Vergleich zum anonymisierten Überfluss populärer Videoportale, bieten wir einen thematisch strukturierten Dialog, in dem jedem Besucher eine Stimme verliehen wird. Dabei ist uns der persönliche Austausch ebenso wichtig wie der digitale; auf den WikiStage Events werden nicht nur WikiTalks aufgenommen, sondern auch Menschen mit ähnlichen Interessen, Zielen und Passionen zusammengebracht.  Dem globalen Austausch steht nicht selten die Sprachbarriere im Weg. In welchen Sprachen findet er bei Ihnen statt? Das Projekt ist erst seit kurzem in Deutschland aktiv, im Vordergrund standen bisher die englische und die französische Sprache. In Zukunft möchten wir die Inhalte auf Deutsch jedoch ausbauen.  Beiträge in anderen Sprachen sind uns ebenso willkommen, etwa so fand vor kurzem in Lima, Peru die WikiStage Weltbank-Konferenz auf Spanisch statt. Was kann WikiStage bewegen? Ich finde, jedes einzelne Video verändert schon etwas, wenn es nur einigen Zuschauer hilft, ein Thema besser zu verstehen oder sich eine eigene Meinung zu bilden. Die WikiStage Events geben Menschen, die etwas zu sagen haben, eine Bühne, von der aus sie ihr Wissen nicht nur mit Anwesenden einer Konferenz, sondern mit der ganzen Welt teilen können.  Mit jeder Veranstaltung tragen wir ein kleines Stück dazu bei, dass Menschen etwas dazu lernen, ihren Horizont erweitern und Stück für Stück eine informiertere, interessiertere und demokratischere Gesellschaft entsteht. Gibt es Potenzial damit auch auf politischer Ebene mitzuwirken? Unsere Hoffnung ist, dass die Sammlung von Expertenwissen und -meinungen sowie das Zusammenkommen verschiedener Interessengruppen zum selben Thema auch das Interesse politischer Entscheidungsträger wecken wird, die mithilfe der populärsten Videos die Meinung der internationalen Gemeinschaftkennen lernen können. Können Sie sich vorstellen, direkten Einfluss auf die Bildung in deutschen Schulen zu nehmen? Auf der einen Seite können die von uns angebotenen Expertenvideos leichterdings als kurzes und verständliches Material in den Unterricht integriert werden.  Andererseits ist es heutzutage wichtiger als je zuvor, öffentlich sprechen und mittels einer Präsentation überzeugen zu können, das ist eine Kompetenz, die meiner Ansicht nach auch in der Schule unterrichtet werden sollte. Zur Gestaltung von Kursen bieten wir gerne unsere Unterstützung an, zum Beispiel hat an einer Pariser Universität kürzlich eine Gruppe von Studenten anstelle eines Examens einen WikiTalk gehalten. Nicht nur unserem Schulunterricht wird also zukünftig etwas mehr Farbe verliehen, sondern jeder von uns kann, unabhängig von Alter oder Nationalität, auf dieser Plattform mehr verstehen, Neues entdecken und seine eigene Meinung einbringen. Das Start-Up macht einen Unterschied, getreu Bittel’s Motto „Let’s make a difference!“  

"In France rather than having petrol, we have the young with brilliant ideas." That was the theme of the first edition of the WikiStage ANAJ-IHEDN, held on the 4th of February in the magnificent premises of the Ecole Militaire, located right in the heart of Paris. L’ANAJ-IHEDN or the National Association of Young Auditors from the High Studies of National Defence Institute is the first French association of young professionals focusing on defence and security issues. Hosting 600 attendees, the room was crowded when François Mattens, the director of l’ANAJ-IHEDN gave the opening speech, including the How and Why of this event. Strengthened by the numerous comities and their representatives, François Mattens and his team came up with the idea to give an on-stage voice to each of them, therefore making an evening of 16 WikiTalks, all given by committed members of their organization. Thanks to this WikiStage, and to the organisation team, led by Pierre Marey-Semper, in charge of the Committee for South America, the audience had the chance to participate in a remarkable WikiStage. The main rule told to the speaker was: “Please yourself! If you enjoy it, the audience will follow you!” And that worked! Built around strong, hard and serious topics, the WikiTalks have been created and given with humour and intelligence. They were amusing while debating on sensitive subjects. We finally got a chance to laugh at the best fails of ISIS, to meet Raoul and his troll face, to listen to the sad story of our red coins and to see a General getting back to his 20’s suit. After 2 hours of great WikiTalks, it was the time to leave the spectacular premises, and to look forward the next edition. In the meantime, we will be able to enjoy over and over their performances as their WikiTalks will soon be on our platform, making sure to keep their messages in our minds.  

As teenager, I spent many hours listening to this German rock band called "Die Ärzte” and in one of their songs, the main theme goes something like this: “It is not your fault that the world is as it is, yet, it would be your fault if it stays that way”. It is enough to watch the news any given day, or simply to pay attention to the less fortunate around you to realise that there is a lot of suffering, hatred and injustice in the world. Change is desperately needed. When Obama ran his 2008 campaign on “Change”, he made a very clear case that, obviously, he wasn’t talking about “negative change”. When initiatives, such as Change.org chose their name, it was clear to them that nobody would misunderstand their intentions and think: “They may want to change the world for the worse”. When we say change, we mean positive change.  “Time is neutral" There is one speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., called “The American Dream”. It is a little less known than his famous “I have a dream” speech but to me it is even more powerful and I admire it. In his plea against racial injustice, he makes the point that time won’t bring about justice by itself. Time is neutral. What is needed to bring about the desired change is that people stand for what they believe in and actively make it happen. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead If change doesn’t occur naturally over time, then individuals have to make it happen. Somebody has to decide: This has to change! Things can’t go on like that. Somebody has to assemble the courage to stand up and say: I will do things differently. I think something else is possible and I’m willing to commit myself. I am willing to take responsibility. This, to me, is the definition of leadership. You don’t need to be a world leader or a celebrity to show leadership. Incredibly important changes happen in the small details of every day life. How much kindness do we show to the people around us? Are we making the groups we come in contact with a little better Leaders for Change No change ever happens without this kind of leadership. Change is an abstract concept and if we want to make it actionable and be serious about it, we have to pay attention to people, because they are the agents of change. Every one of us can and should strive to be a “Leader for Change”. Why WikiStage as a network for change? As video platform and network of conference organisers, what we can do is to celebrate Leaders for Change and give their ideas and initiatives a stage. Our hope is that by directing the spotlight on those who decide to publicly speak out about their ideas and convictions, others will get inspired and feel empowered to bring about change themselves.  We connect leaders and ideas in the real world at WikiStage events and online on the WikiStage.org video platform. Visitors of the website can see the best talks of a speaker on his or her profile as well as the other videos that have been recorded at our conferences. We attribute each video to a larger debate with a hashtag, for example #ClimateChange or #HumanRights and allow users to upvote their favourite videos for every cause. The “Wiki” in WikiStage When visitors upvote videos for a debate, they collectively decide about the best ideas and contributions on any given topic. Thanks to your vote, the best videos rise to the top of the wall of that debate. It is the community who ultimately decides what inspires them and whose ideas deserve to get the most attention. Thanks to other user’s votes, we all now have a way to quickly learn about the most important contributions on the issues. Simply by watching the top rated videos, we can learn about different perspectives from the brightest minds who  spoke in public about the issue. We can do more than just “vote" Similar to our democratic process, some will simply vote and some will want to shape the debate more actively. There are many forums and social media websites on the internet where anybody can share anything. At WikiStage, we have chosen our format: we connect people at real life events and share the ideas on our platform with videos. If you want to become an active part in one of our debates, we invite you to become an independent WikiStage Conference organiser and to give a stage to those people who you believe deserve to be heard. After you obtain our license through our website, our non-profit organisation will guide and advise you to help you create a meaningful event with valuable contributions - and the best thing: the license is completely free.  

For those of you who are fairly new to the concept of WikiStage, allow me to spend a few paragraphs explaining our mission and achievements so far. Back in 2013 when we started this project with an event at ESCP Europe, we wanted to establish a network of events around the world that would tackle different issues, from start-up entrepreneurship to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. We set ourselves a mission to use modern technology to revolutionize the way events are organized worldwide. Only 20 years ago, the reach of most conferences was restricted to their immediate audiences. Some of these events were probably very inspiring (some of them probably only had an exciting buffet), but there is no way for us to check that unless we know someone who went. Today, the situation has unfortunately not changed that much. Still, there are hundreds of events worldwide that are either not recorded or are recorded in such a way that makes it impossible to follow, or share on social media. For example: the videos are too long (4 hour long videos with all event talks and discussions), the videos look boring (shot from one position), the individual talks are way too long (2-hour dictator-addresses-the-United-Nations style talk with the help of a PowerPoint presentation). Luckily, things do not have to be like that anymore. Digitalize the events! It is the sharing revolution. It is the death of PowerPoint. Our events have not always been TED-like events with audience of thousands; we wanted to include smaller events - WikiStage Corners, where speakers give talks to a smaller audience. The common denominator of all these conferences is not just the WikiStage branding but also the fact that all event talks (short, focused - WikiTalks) were recorded and published on WikiStage.org. The idea was to give an opportunity to mainly young and enthusiastic people to organize events and give their speakers a global audience, regardless where in the World they are, or the lack of finance or logistics they might be facing if they wanted to organize a full-fledged high profile conference. The idea was not just to digitalize events, but also to democratize them. Three years later, we take a look back and we can say we have succeeded in making WikiStage a global brand. With a network of over 500 volunteers we have organized more than 70 events on 4 different continents. We have had over 350 speakers, total number of Facebook followers of all WikiStage pages has exceeded 55.000 and people have spent 2 years equivalent of time watching our WikiTalks. Beyond our initial partner ESCP Europe, we partnered up for individual confrences and recordings with the World Bank Group, SUEZ Environment, YESS, MEDEF, OuiShare, the French Embassy in Berlin, Maison de l'Europe de Paris, and many other. What’s next? We are still far from done in our mission to revolutionize the way ideas travel from events to audiences. Our next mission is to become THE platform for event talks. We seek to establish partnerships with event organizers around the world in order to add their event talks to our platform. We add the talks to different #debates in order to have videos on similar issues from a variety of events at one place, where the users can have a comprehensive overview of the issue, compare different positions, and vote for the best talks.  There are several types of partnerships we offer to conference organizers. The most lightweight is the one when events are already perfectly recorded, speeches are already short and focused, everything is online and ready to be shared. In this case, we only integrate the videos on our platform. In this way, we give not only a bigger audience to these event talks, but also an opportunity to compare them to the ones from other, related events. Further on, in case an event is filmed but the video is too long and/or shot from one position, we offer two types of partnerships. First, our video editing crew edits your event video and publishes all event talks on our platform. Second option, which can work together with the first: our film production crew records your next event, edits the talks, makes them look awesome and we, again, publish them on WikiStage.org. And, as they say in those cheesy TV commercials - that is not all! A closer WikiStage partnership includes our team of professional presentation coaches who help the speakers of a partner-event prepare their talks and rock the stage. Short and focused talks that have a long-lasting impact on the audience and a potential to go viral – this is the format they teach the speakers through really amazing workshops and individual coaching sessions. Organizers can also, in case they are not already using a similar format, opt for organizing WikiTalks as a distinct part of their conference. A great example for this would be an academic conference. Imagine having, for example, a group of leading physicists dealing with the theory of relativity doing WikiTalks next to their main, scientific event, in order to transmit their knowledge to the general audience. Amazing, right?    Will we become THE platform for event talks three years from now? We will do it even before, because we are not just a platform, but we offer a full service to event organizers, in-house, in one organization - WikiStage - led by young people (all employees are less than 30 years old), true to its original mission and enthusiastic about making the World a better place. Are you an event organizer and you are interested in becoming a partner of WikiStage in any of the ways described? Contact us here.

“Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.” ― Gautama Buddha Can an inclination of a person towards knowledge change the world? If you think “No”, then meet Johannes Bittel, Founder of WikiStage, a free platform for learning and democratic debate. I met Johannes in a cafe in Berlin where he confessed his passion as a student to search on Youtube for information ranging from Electric Cars to benefits of Vegetarianism. However, he felt a bit lost because he could not easily find quality videos on many topics. As a result, he started to get involved in organizing conferences such as LSE London Development Forum at LSE and he organized the first TEDx event at a French Grande Ecole: TEDxESCP in Paris. Yet, he felt that something was wrong, that made these conferences elitist and hindered the free flow of democratic knowledge and that obtaining a license for, for example, a TEDx event is very expensive. As he elaborates that to apply to organize a larger TEDx Event one must attend a TED Conference that costs $8,500-13.500. This became the founding idea of WikiStage, where people around the globe who share the same quest and motivation can fill a simple form on www.wikistage.org and organize free WikiStage events, inviting experts in community to discuss issues ranging from education to refugees or from corruption to free speech. The first conference was organized in Paris in 2013, and since then there is no turning back. The network has seen exponential growth to 45 conferences in 2015 and in 2016, he expects a 100 unique conferences such as the recent conference at École Militaire: Necessity to think differently, where people who decide over life and death discuss what it takes to have such responsibility. He believes that this flexibility towards organizers combined with democratic and creative thinking of organizers is taking this concept to new heights such as upcoming WikiStage Conference at ESCP in March 2016. The organizers at ESCP will organize 5 conferences simultaneously in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, London, and Turin, where eminent speakers will discuss the “Good of Finance”. Recent events such as the possibility of a Brexit, the refugee crisis and debt woes of Europe, together with anemic growth have threatened or posed serious questions to the European identity and global financial order. As the future becomes uncertain ESCP Europe wants to emphasize on unity and strength of European identity, leading to an idea of 5 conferences. Christian Wortmann, president of WikiStage ESCP Europe sees a great future for the format of a unique pan-European conference which allows speakers, the audience and those who join the debate online to look at European challenges from five different perspectives. Moreover, he and his team are already working on the third edition in 2017 while organising the conference series of 2016. One team member from Madrid recently said “It is a truly European initiative and it is enriching in terms of personal network, shared knowledge and understanding of other cultures”.

Team Enactus ENSET Mohammedia is organising the 19th of March 2016 at 2pm an event called WikiStage ENSET Mohammedia. The central theme of this event is “Dynamic of young social entrepreneurs: Where are we now?“. Wikistage is a succession of interventions of specialists, artists and enthusiasts who will have the distinction of being filmed and shared on the WikiStage platform to create a library of videos that is totally free to use: the WikiTalks. This event aims to transmit a clear message: that “the Moroccan youth is a movement”; it allows to know the place of entrepreneurship within the scholar environment. Also, the goal of this event is to realize the steps to follow and to move from the will to act - to the courage, to dare, to achieve the objective which is the societal progress. We promise very interesting workshops, and musical performances for a warm and rich atmosphere. We hope for all of you to come or at least follow us on Facebook for updates. Loubna Terrada - Communication Manager of WikiStage ENSET Mohammedia.