Projekt:Europeana Awareness 2012/Wikimania-presentation
Slide 1 – Overview
Hi everybody,
My name is John Andersson and I am working for Wikimedia Sverige with a project called Europeana Awareness. I have been working on this project for a bit more than a year now. This has been a really interesting time for me!
Even though I had been a very active writer and administrator on our projects before I started working for Wikimedia Sverige I was pretty much new to the work done in the Chapters. So for me this was a really cool new thing for me and really a whole new world was opening up to me. What was really cool with this project was that I was suppose to learn not just about the Swedish Chapter but as this project strived for cooperation between chapters I was suppose to learn about the international movement as a whole in order to find ways to collaborate and do cool things together in more than one country.
Luckely enough for me I was working on this together with Lennart Guldbrandsson, who at the time was acting as the project leader and mentor for me the first months. Our task was rather tricky and challenging – we were suppose to find ways of collaborating with the different chapters which is rather new and a challenge in itself, but on top of that we wanted to integrate Europeana's material on Wikimedia's projects (in all the events that we organised), and tell as many volunteers as possible about the similarities between our work and about the great material that Europeana has. This is one part of it.
On the other hand we also had to explain to Europeana how the Wikimedia community worked and what they could expect, for example how many volunteers they could expect to participate etc., while we had to follow a Description of Work that was rather incomplete and unclear. I figure this is kind of similar to what a Wikipedian in Recidency is usually struggling with.
Slide 2 – Quote
This quote from Liam Wyatt pretty much explains what this cooperation is all about. "We're doing the same thing, for the same reason, for the same people, in the same medium. Let's do it together." – Liam Wyatt, former Wikipedian in Residence at the British Museum. The thing is that Europeana is an awesome trans-European project that is focusing on gathering the collections of Europe's GLAMs in one place online. They collect the meta-data about objects in the GLAMs under a CC0 license and make it all searchable in one portal. In this portal there are now more than 27 million items available. Europeana has around 2,200 GLAM partners all over Europe.
Slide 3 – Overview
Europeana shares many of our ideas and values and try hard to get GLAMs to use CC-licenses. They look at us in the Wikimedia community as the perfect partner to do this with. Because we have the end-users and getting their material on to Wikimedia Commons will get more people to see it and can potentially bring a huge amount of traffic to the websites of the GLAM institutions. But even though we have a lot of similarities we have not really worked on this together before our project.
Slide 4-7 – Involved groups
In this project we had a rather large set of deliverables with a lot of events that we would execute during this time. The goal with the events was to reach three different groups: GLAM staff and experts; The general public, we wanted everybody to know about our cooperation and use the material; Wikipedians/Wikimedians:
- Four types of volunteers:
- Editors
- Photographers
- Developers
- GLAM-Outreach volunteers
So we figured that we had to work with four types of events to reach different type of volunteers:
- Edit-a-thons, which was a type of event where you can reach everybody.
- Conferences, where you won't reach the general public but where you can reach a lot of Wikimedians and GLAM staffers.
- Hackathons. Where you can reach new and old developers from all of the different groups.
- And finally photo contests, where you mainly reach wikimedians and the general public.
Slide 8 – Overview of the edit-a-thons
I would like to start with telling you a bit about our different edit-a-thons.
Slide 9 – WWI Edit-a-thon in Stockholm and Parallel WWI Edit-a-thons
Our first joint edit-a-thon, where we used images from Europeana, took place in November 2012. We were a rather small group with 13 people but we very highly productive with 20 images being used in 62 articles.
Before this event Europeana had the belief that we needed larger groups to make it worthwhile. But here we showed that a smaller group of highly skilled editors with a clear set of tasks and a topic that they enjoy could be extremely productive for a very low cost – in fact as we initiated a new cooperation and could use their venue we only spent a couple of hundred euros at this event.
After a couple of months when we were able give some numbers of articles views and tell them that we have around 300,000-400,000 views per month they were very happy! So my strong advice is that when you have had an event with a GLAM, be sure to think true already in the planning where you can add suitable images to get some good viewing numbers and then be sure to let your GLAM partner know about the results! They will be impressed, I promise you!
And when they know the impact it should also be easier to get them to release some of their more interesting images later on in future cooperations as that could give them even more viewers! I mean, it is boring gathering the numbers but they will be well received and your GLAM partners will be more willing to communicate about it later on! They need data to convince their boards about the value of these efforts.
We decided to do something similar again and use the material we already had prepared for our first edit-a-thon. Hence, we organized a series of 7 parallel edit-a-thons that took place in different countries on 29 June! At least 50 people took part. Possibly up to 60 or 70.
All used material from Europeana and they could participate in the Europeana Challenge where the most productive volunteer could win a travel cheque worth 300 euros!
The idea with these edit-a-thons was to highlight the possibility to cooperate nowadays, to increase cooperation between chapters, find new GLAM partners and of course improve Wikipedia! We were super happy that Wikipedians started uploading material from Europeana themselves and illustrating some of our best articles with the images. Overall this was a really fun experience and we have been thinking about possibilities to the same type of parallel edit-a-thon again, but with a different theme this time. Which leads us to our next event.
Slide 10 – Fashion Edit-a-thon in Stockholm
We decided to follow this up with a completely different type of edit-a-thon. This time we wanted two very elusive groups to participate and improve Wikipedia. We wanted women to start contributing and we wanted to improve our fashion coverage.
Fashion topics are poorly covered on English Wikipedia and incredibly weak on Swedish Wikipedia so this was indeed needed. That this potentially could increase the amount of female editors a bit was also central in our planning. I am not a fashionista myself, but we found ourselves some great partners for the expert help!
We discussed this quite extensively with our partners, Europeana, Europeana Fashion, Stockholm University and The Nordic museum how to reach these groups and we came to the conclusion that this group might demand a bit more to get their attention and interest. As Europeana Fashion had a rather generous budget for this we decided that this edit-a-thon could cost a bit more this time, but at the same time we expected a longer event with a lot more people.
We organized a free lunch, some wine and snacks for the mingle at the end, a special guided tour of the museum's collections, a goodie-bag and the promise of a nice diploma at the end. And we set a clear roof for the amount of people. Trying hard to make this feel rather exclusive and special.
The teachers at Stockholm University also promoted this heavily to their most active and best students and the Nordiska museet also used their big contact net in the fashion world to spark some interest.
As this would be a big group we organized a preparatory workshop in advance where ten students took part. They could then help their friends to get starting and make the main event more efficient.
We were very, very happy that 47 people participated at the event in the end and that a majority were women! In fact this is Wikimedia Sverige's biggest edit-a-thon to date!
Two museums also released material, specifically for the edit-a-thon! The majority came from the Nordiska museet but the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerpen also uploaded a few images with assistance from us. We had around 400 images uploaded during the preparations that we encouraged the participants to use when writing their Wikipedia articles.
Slide 11 – Collection Days Edit-a-thon in Poland
A few months later we also had a cool little edit-a-thon in Warsaw, Poland together with Wikimedia Polska. There we used material from the so called “Collection Days” and from the Europeana portal.
During a Collection Day memorabilia from the general public is gathered and digitized and then put online under a free license online. This time Europeana focused on memorabilia from the time around 1989 and the big changes in Europe around that time as the Soviet Union was starting to fall.
We could add the digitized material to Wikimedia Commons and use it on Wikipedia and tell people about our work and how to participate.
The reason we thought that this would be cool to organize was the possibility to use this concept also in other countries later on. The thing is that more Collections Days will be organized in Europe during the rest of 2013 and during 2014!
Hence I gathered the experiences in a blog post that I hope will make it a bit easier for other Chapters in Eastern Europe to do the organize similar events. You can find the post on WMF's blog. I would also be happy to help you get in contact with the organizations organizing the Colķlection days in your countries later on. If you are from countries such as Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania or Latvia please get in contact with me!
Slide 12 – 1864 edit-a-thon in Sweden and Denmark
If time permits...
Slide 13 – Overview of the conferences
We have also been involved in a few conferences were we have spread information about the project and tried to involve new people in our work.
Slide 14 – GLAM-WIKI 2013 Conference in London
We also took part in the organization of the GLAM-WIKI conference in London where 150 people participated. Our main involvement was with getting the word out to European GLAMs and with getting speakers and Europeana staff to take part and for example organize the GLAMwiki toolset workshop.
It was great fun working with the team at Wikimedia UK. They did a fantastic work with making the conference a great experience so I really look forward what they will achieve next year when Wikimania is being organized in London!
Slide 15 – Digikult Conference in Gothenburg
We also organized a cultural heritage conference combined with a hackathon in Gothenburg, Sweden. We had over 100 participants there participating mostly of GLAM staffers. The participants were very happy about the conference which was focusing on getting things started instead of just talking.
Europeana took part presenting there and talked about our common work and we also had a hackathon were we used Europeana's API and developed a new tool. With this tool you can find objects in different collections connected to a geographical position in your close proximity, giving a historical layer when you are out walking and have a smart phone with you.
The tool was very appreciated and one of the GLAMs will now pay for having it developed further! This event was paid in full by the participants so Wikimedia Sverige didn't have any direct event cost.
Slide 16 – Overview of the hackathons
We also did a couple of hackathons.
Slide 17 – Unconference and hackathon in London
We supported the unconference part in connection to the GLAM-WIKI 2013 conference where 70 people registered. A few of these people were actively involved in the hackathon part and developed a new tool for uploading sound on Wikimedia Commons and a bunch of people gave suggestions for improvements of the GLAMwiki Toolset.
However, as it was a real unconference day there mainly was a lot of small talk and networking taking place, which was needed after the conference.
Slide 18 – Wikimedia Hackathon Netherlands 2013 in Amsterdam
As part of the project we of course also participated in the Wikimedia Hackathon, the largest yearly hackathon for the Wikimedia movement!
This year it took place in Amsterdam and my co-worker André Costa was present and discussed how to work on our Open Database of Public Artworks in Sweden and how to prepare tools etc. for the WLPA photo contest in 2014 (I will tell you more about that in a second).
André also worked with Maarten Dammers on fixing a bug on a tool Maarten developed previously. This work make it so much easier to copy material from Europeana and it saved me personally a lot of time latter when I uploaded a large number of images from Europeana for our edit-a-thons.
Slide 19 – Photo contest
Great way of reaching out to the general public interested in art Media attention. Great material covering one topic for limited cost.
Slide 20 – Wiki Loves Public Art
I would like to tell you very shortly about the international photo contest Wiki Loves Public Art that we organized for the first time in May this year. I will keep it short as I have a presentation about the contest tomorrow that I hope that you will come and listen to.
The contest is called Wiki Loves Public Art and it focuses on the public artworks in the participating countries, both outdoors in parks and squares etc. but for countries with limited FoP also on the artworks in museums.
We thought that artworks was a suitable topic as so many of them are stolen, damaged or simply removed every year. They don’t have that good protection so there really is a deadline if we want to digitize them.
This was obviously inspired by Wiki Loves Monuments but it has quite some differences. This year there were pilots in five countries trying out the concept! The contest took place in a few cities in Austria, Finland, Israel, Spain and Sweden. This was because the countries, with the exception of Israel did not have national databases of their artworks so we started it small with some of the cities that already had databases with their artworks.
This year we have built up the technical infrastructure and prepared so that the contest can be organized in more countries next year, and we will be able to use a lot of tools developed for Wiki Loves Monuments!
Despite tricky legislation in some countries we had a great result! Over 9,000 images uploaded during the contest by225 participants! Overall we now have nearly 75% coverage of all listed artworks in the cities that we prepared for.
We would like to expand to more countries next year so please get in contact with me about that AND COME LEARN MORE ABOUT WIKI LOVES PUBLIC ART AT MY PRESENTATION TOMORROW!