2010 chapters meeting/Sarahs notes

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Sarah's notes

Sue Gardner's presentation

Pasting my notes below. On the second day I attended the External Communication working group, which was mostly about public relations and working with the press and Andrew attended the Education working group. On Sunday, I attended the session on working with external organisations and Andrew went to the professionalisation session.

(Please excuse any typos etc!)

State of the Chapters.

Brazil

  • Has conducted 6 workshops
  • Involvement in politics

Swiss

  • 93 members, an increase in 63% in last year
  • Income 90,000 franks (around 62 000 euros)
  • 2008 best membership rate per capita
  • Biggest issue is language
  • First hire

Czech Republic

  • Founded 2008
  • Currently 30 members; 7-10 active
  • Last general assembly was held in April, 2010
  • First conference held in Prague with 70 participants
  • Two exhibitions have been held in Prague
  • Chapter camera - 646 photos since Jan 010
  • Specialised pictures - 165 photos and focusing on publicly inaccessible facilities
  • Offered prizes for improvement of poorly covered topics on cs wki
  • Magazine
  • Main concern for future: Active core of ~7 burning out.
  • Looking at making first hire.

Germany

  • Kompas 2020
  • Continuous growth in resources (funding and staff)
  • Increasing significance of Wikipedia in public perception
  • Lack of clear direction, goals, objectives
  • Focus on short-term activities, tech, events, etc.
  • Stakeholder analysis -
  • Who cares about WM de
  • Who influences us
  • Common vision
  • 12 core statements
  • Strategic goals
  • Long term vision:
  • Traditional Media outlets to publish free content
  • Free knowledge present in the media
  • Media to contact us as first source

Denmark

  • Founded 13 months ago
  • Based in Copenhagen
  • 17 members
  • Have conducted little outreach to members and potential members
  • Outreach to museums

Estonia

  • 20 people
  • Just starting up
  • Some of the founding members are not Wikimedia project editors
  • Focusing on improving Estonia-related content on Wikipedia
  • Outreach to schools, editing, using Wikipedia, etc.

Hong Kong

  • Goal: improve transparency of governors and establish council
  • Wish to help Wikimedia Macau establish a chapter and organise a conference
  • University of Hong Kong, radio and tv, to use CC license
  • Future plans - improve school outreach

Hungry

  • Founded 2008
  • About 30 members
  • Involved in amending the National Bank of Hungary’s copyright licensing
  • Merchandise
  • Future plans-
  • Interested in building a Hungarian toolserver
  • Wikicamp
  • Wikimuseum - GLAM cooperation

Austria

  • Reached two goals last year:
  • Book scholarship for Austria topics
  • Developed a collaborative watchlist feature - was implemented as a special: page on Wikipedia so multiple users can monitor the same central watchlist and tag edits as necessary

France

  • Created 2004
  • Nine board members - two year terms with staggered elections
  • Currently 200 members
  • Just hired first permanent staff member - Bastien Guerry - as freelance secretary. Will be hiring an external accountant n 2010
  • Office is hosted in co-working space in Paris
  • Board held two in-person meetings in 2009
  • Multi-point strategic focus:
  1. Promotion of Wikimedia projects
    • tool server licence
    • Supporting accreditation for photographers
    • Multimedia Usability Meeting in Paris, October, 2009
  2. Improving communication and visibility - new website and blog, created by outside org
  3. Supporting the infrastructure of the projects - software, hardware, organisation of multimedia project
  4. Relationships with museums
    • Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris partnership - working together with Wikisource on 1400 documents
  5. Image
  • Opening Wikimedia France shop (!)
  • Finances: donations in 2009: 230,000 euros
  • Money spent in 2009: 76,000 euros
  • Total membership fees in 2009; 3000 euros
  • Now accepting credit card payments
  • Have now reached a level of fundraising that requires mandatory auditing (over 153,000 euros)

Plans for 2010:

  • GLAM projects
  • Improved photographer accreditation
  • More promotional material
  • Second staff member ad a stabilised office base.

Indonesia

  • Established in 2008
  • Projects - Wikipedia training throughout Indonesia
  • "Free Your Knowledge" writing contest for the Indonesian language Wikipedia
  • Online dictionary project
  • Finances - 245 euros

Israel

  • Founded in 2007
  • Registered in the State of Israel
  • 2010 budget - 20,000 euros
  • 2009 WikiAcademy at Tel Aviv University was attended by 250 people
  • Large reader survey in HE Wikipedia:
  • 75% think it is reliable.
  • 69% prefer it to any other encyclopedia.
  • 3394 people responded to the survey.
  • PhysiWiki writing contest.
  • Israeli Parliamentary Committee for Science and Culture held a special session honoring HE Wikipedia for reaching 100,000 articles.
  • Crown copyrights legislation reform in progress.
  • Offline He Wikipedia on the "One Computer per Child" computers.
  • Collaboration with Wikimedia CH is nearing deployment.
  • Sponsoring and promoting the Elef Milim image gathering project with thousands of images contributed to Commons already.

India

  • Monthly meetups
  • Promoting Wikipedia Day.
  • Chapter formation.
  • Tamil and Malayan working with the Indian government.
  • Tamil world conference.
  • Goals:
  • Get the chapter approved.
  • Currently have successful regular meetups in one metro area and they wish to replicate this in different regions and eventually make the meetups work in six metro areas.
  • Bid for 2012 Wikimania.

Italy

  • Now five years old
  • Has grown from 18 founding members to 183 members as at March 2010.
  • Has a physical office in Rome which is shared with another organisation.
  • 2009 budget was 67,000 euros.
  • Outreach initiatives include labs throughout Italy.
  • "Wiki @ home" – interviews with famous people regarding technology, Wikipedia, free knowledge, etc.
  • biblioteca de musica: locally managed wikiproject not under the WMF umbrella which hosts material considered "free" by Italian copyright law but not by commons policy.
  • WikiAfrica project: collecting free material from and about Africa.
  • A 20 million euro lawsuit against Wikimedia Italia.

Nederlands

  • Wiki loves Art
  • Tropenmuseum - >37K image donations
  • Priorities:
  • Technology
  • Community
  • Outreach
  • Content
  • Organisation – local and worldwide
  • Needs:
  • Money!
  • People
  • Improve donation methods for next fundraiser.
  • Grant applications
  • Working with volunteers – Wiki Loves Monuments (60k monuments on WP)
  • Smart partnerships – Wiki Loves Libraries, also Media Literacy, Local Cultural Heritage etc.
  • Professionalisation- GLAM/WIKI conference to be held in the fall 2010.
  • Political lobby
  • Wikiportrait

Norway

  • Founded in 2007
  • 55 members, including two corporate members
  • Held a Wikipedia Academy in 2009 which received about 30 mentions in the Norwegian media.
  • Round table conference with politicians, media, Jimmy.
  • Long term problems, concerns and issues:
  • Institutional knowledge when board members are replaced
  • Continuity within the organisation.

Philippines

  • Incorporated in April 2010 as a non-profit, non-stock organisation.
  • Is keen to build links with other chapters in the region.

Poland

  • Created in 2005
  • 108 members
  • Membership fees 1 PLN
  • Organisational structure:
  • 5 board members
  • 3 member revision committee
  • 3 member internal court
  • 5 member wikigrants commission
  • Has a small rented office
  • Projects:
  • Meetings
  • Meetups
  • Conferences
  • Coalition of open education
  • Public Domain Day
  • Wikiexpeditions
  • Wikiworkshops
  • Wikigrants
  • Wikimania

Portugese

  • Created in 2010
  • Has 10 members and only 5 are active.
  • Attempting to use social media networks, blog, etc to increase visibility

Serbia

  • Founded in 2005
  • Problem: most Serbian contributors are overseas and not able to participate in local chapter activities.

Russia

  • Established in 2008
  • 12 members
  • 3 persons do 95% of the chapter's work.
  • Mailing list has about 30 persons subscribed
  • No hired staff
  • Budget – about $US25,000
  • Founders fee - $US2,000
  • Donations - $US22,000
  • Sponsorship - $US1,000
  • Spending - $2500
  • Activities:
  • Wikiconference in St Petersburg was run in cooperation with State University of Information Technologies Mechanics and Optics. Had about 80 attendees, including one participant from Poland.
  • Cooperation with Chastnyj Korresondents newspaper
  • Wish to provide press accreditation to for Wikimedians.

Sweden

  • Founded in 2007
  • Events include: book fair, conferences, Wiki Academy
  • Mostly orientated on outreach.
  • Incorporated as an association with 200 members paying membership fee of 10 euros per year.
  • Want to improve contacts and connections with other chapters, especially neighboring chapters.

Ukraine

  • Established and registered by the state in 2009.
  • Focused on Ukrainian language projects.
  • Ukrainian Wikipedia has 200K+ articles.
  • Recognised by several academics and noted people, including:
  • The Science and Education Minister of Ukraine
  • An Academic from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
  • A Doctor of Sciences and author of the Small Mining Encyclopedia

UK

  • Incorporated in 2008 and recognised by the WMF board in 2009.
  • Has 76 members
  • Fundraiser raised about 90,000 pounds
  • Britain Loves Wikipedia covered 20 museums and resulted in 560 photos uploaded to Commons
  • GLAM-WIKI UK
  • “Wiki Tales” event
  • Looking at hiring staff (either office staff or developers)
  • Support toolserver and multimedia usability
  • Microgrants

US-NYC

  • Local focused
  • Holds meetings every two months
  • Wiki takes Manhattan 3
  • Wikiconf NY
  • Wikipedia Day
  • Video project: "Lights, Camera, Wiki!"

Report on the developers' meeting

  • Presented by Danny Kintzer, software developer at WM De.
  • Was a successful meeting and they felt they achieved a lot.
  • Summary of issues discussed at dev meeting:
  • Usability
  • Editor, syntax editing, templates, WYSIWYG.devs will take time.
  • Improve accessibility for the deaf, blind etc. How to make content accessible and to facilitate editing by people with such needs. This needs further development.
  • Accessibility from offline devices, semi-online devices, ability to provide feedback integrated to talk pages. Developments in this direction should be soon.
  • Authentication.
  • New installations of MediaWiki software: how to make it easier for people to install MediaWiki and ways to streamline the set-up process, implementing software extensions etc.
  • Structured data: how to best express this data, reuse content in templates, annotate template parameters. Where and how to store. Use of the semantic wiki.
  • Looking at infrastructure for importing external data, for example sources, bibliographic data etc.
  • How to use and search structured data and meta data, licensing information etc.
  • Organizational issues
  • Foundation issues, such as improving coding work flow, integration of testing, quality assurance, etc.
  • integrate testing into developer process
  • Had a session re tool server and open street maps
  • How to integrate maps. Why the developers got stuck, rendering on server. Hopes for progress by the end of the year for this item.
  • Accessibility statistics: what pages are accessed each hour etc. Look at trends, changes and variations, etc.
  • Valuable to replace external tools and do this on the tool server
  • Flagged Revisions
  • No results on basic impact
  • Statistics on flagging.
  • Facilitating multi-lingual searching of commons
  • Liquid Threads coming "really soon now"

Wikimedia Foundation - Update on the Wikimedia five-year Strategic Plan

(l-r) Lodewijk Gelauff, Pavel Richter and Sue Gardner, "Update on the Wikimedia five-year Strategic Plan", 2010 WMF meeting.
  • Jan Bart gave an introduction
  • Eugene Kim from Blue Oxen Associates gave an overview of the Strategy Wiki.
  • Sue Gardner gave a presentation on the progress of the five-year Strategic Plan

Strategy Wiki Overview

  • Presented by Eugene Kim.
  • Over 2000 content pages (excluding proposals) in 6 months.
  • Over 800 proposals.
  • Over 50 languages represented.
  • Over 950 contributors with about 70 contributors active monthly.
  • Liquid Threads activity: strategy wiki saw one of the first deployments of the Liquid Threads extension.
  • Over 4,500 total posts (24/day)
  • 415 total participants posting (11/day)

Sue Gardner's presentation: "Update on the Wikimedia five-year Strategic Plan"

  • Presented by Sue Gardner.
  • The Foundation's strategic plan was announced at last year’s chapters meeting, so this was the one year update on progress.
  • The Wikimedia projects are now the fifth most visited web properties in the world.
  • 350 million unique visitors each month to over 700 projects in 271 different languages, all built and maintained by 100,000 active contributors.
  • Over the last nine years, there has been significant growth in reach, content and participation. Growth has been organic and occurred naturally. Growth has been initiated at both the grassroots - volunteer/editor/administrator - and WMF board levels, as well as by advisers, friends and supporters of he projects.
  • Wikimedia has been more successful by every measure in the global north than in the global south.
  • We know that growing the number of editors, and therefore readership, will be more difficult in the global south (developing world).
  • The foundation also recognises signs of stagnation in the mature and successful projects and considers it worrying.

Purpose of the strategy project

  • To achieve better outcomes than would be possible without intervention.
  • To make specific deliberate investments designed to expand reach, content etc.

Global penetration according to ComScore statistics

Penetration rates are calculated as the percentage of available internet users using Wikipedia, according to Comscore's statistics.

  • The highest penetration in terms of visitors is in Canada, Germany and Japan, which is all over 40% of internet users.
  • Lowest penetration is in China with less than 1% of internet users.

Penetration in Asia and Africa is generally very low and in Europe it is generally very high.

  • Australia has a penetration of 30-40% of internet users

At current growth rates, by 2015 nearly half the world may have access to a Wikipedia in their own language. By 2015, nearly half the world will have access to a "mature" encyclopedia in their own language. "Mature encyclopedia" defined as 120,000 articles (based on Encyclopedia Britannica). This is only half the world and it depends on maintaining active and healthy editing communities that in some case don’t yet exist.

Bridgespan analysis of active contributors

  • 12 Wikipedias have more than 1,000 active editors ("active editors" defined as editors making 5+ edits in a month)
  • 31 Wikipedias have 100-1,000 active editors
  • All other Wikipedias have below 100 editors and lack the internal stability required for ongoing growth.
  • Mature projects need to increase participant diversify to avoid decline.
  • Small projects need to rapidly grow articles and recruitment of new, active participants.
  • The Russian Wikipedia is currently the largest growing Wikipedia.

The goal is to achieve long term growth

  • The goal is to achieve strong and steady growth.
  • By 2015, increase reach to 680 million people. Current reach is estimated at around 400 million people (this estimate is higher than ComScore because it was based on data from the International Telecommunication Union, which includes all internet users, including those accessing from internet cafes).
  • Reach, participation and content operate in a cycle, with increase or decrease of each factor affecting and impacting on the others.
>Reach > Participation > Content >

To achieve this, the foundation has set three main board approved goals:

  1. Build the technological and operating platform that enable Wikimedia to function sustainably as a top global internet property.
    • Continue focus on usability and interaction design; set up tools and systems for collecting and communicating data.
  2. Strengthen, grow and increase diversity of the editing community that is the lifeblood of the projects.
    • Shelter and. support new editors, provide funding for face-to-face meetups, encourage development of new tools that enable collaboration and support social bonding.
  3. Accelerate impact by investing in key geographic areas, mobile application development and bottom up innovation.
    • Continue supporting partnerships that expand mobile and offline reach; deploy staff teams in high-potential geographies to recruit new editors and strengthen the existing community; fund outreach activities and develop tools and kits in support of them.

Wikimedia believes the chapters are critical to successful global program activities.

Things the foundation believes the chapters can focus on

What the chapters can contribute
  • Evangelise on behalf of the Wikimedia projects to the media and general public.
  • Stage outreach events designed to recruit new editors, especially subject-matter-experts, social engineers, and women.
  • Develop content partnerships with GLAM organisations and public service media.
  • Working with experienced editors and other volunteers to support a healthy, productive Wikimedia community.
  • Supporting volunteers in their efforts to provide good service and accountability to Wikimedia readers.
  • Representing Wikimedia's agenda to policy makers around issues such as copyright law, censorship, open access and open standards.
  • Fundraising to ensure the sustainability of the Wikimedia movement.

How the foundation can best help the chapters

  • To evangelise
  • To better understand readers, new editors, experienced editors and donors
  • To recruit new editors
  • To support a healthy, productive editing community
  • To fundraise
  • To accelerate their organisational development (hiring of staff, developing plans etc.)

Discussion

What's the most important part of the strategy? What are your priorities and what can you contribute? How can the foundation help you?

  • Support of the global south.
  • Stability of growth.
  • Relationship between foundation and chapters.
  • Being analytical about what’s happening in the projects and use data to respond.

What surprises you?

  • Alignment between Wikimedia's thinking and Wikimedia DE's process.
  • Impact of criticism of Wikimedia.
  • Limited focus on the scope.
  • Questions of "takeovers" by small but organised groups on smaller communities.
  • Africa - SB faster growth.
  • Misalignment between WMF geo focus and role of chapters.
  • Partnerships with large/small enterprises.

What are your chapters priorities/what can you contribute?

  • increasing participation in the sociological (political, cultural, economic) context of their community. What does it mean to expand participation in a local context?
  • Context:
  • Many chapters are working to build their organisations.
  • Important to strengthen these for long term.
  • Build new chapters in other geographies and within the US.
  • Focus on the "child who is not born yet"; what's going to be important for the next generation; what will be need in 5 years.
  • Provide a humanistic face to wikimedia, engage people/public and connect to national development, *Motivate people to join us
  • The foundation's support for chapters:
  • Relationship of equals, more rights, eg merchandise.
  • Real communication, dialogue, exchange of best practices.
  • Help reach full potential by helping chapters reach sustainability and stability, enabling them to do the strategically valuable work.
  • Kick-start assistance via grants and other financial aid for chapters.
  • Chapters helping other chapters, sharing experiences, practices, etc. The foundation can act as a best practices hub in the network of chapters.
  • Regional collaboration with foundation support (eg Pan-Asian Association).
  • The foundation could provide start-up funds to assist with the first steps of establishing new chapters.

Working group: Volunteers

With a grant presentation by Erik

  • The chapter's activity level and focus is an important key to recruiting volunteers.
  • Finding leaders with the time and interest and motivating volunteers are significant and universal issues among the chapters.

Financial collaboration

  • Grant applications - Be Bold!
  • $US100,000 in grants
  • New meta space Grants:Index
  • The foundation "won't fund insane projects"! But they want the chapters to submit applications and propose ideas.
  • Completing reports is very important because the reports help the board determine what projects are likely to work and what ones most likely wont work and impact on future decision-making regarding applications.
  • Grants which have failed are not necessarily taken into account in considering other grants.
  • When making an application, be sure to calculate for exchange rate losses.
  • Also be sure to address how the proposed project fits Wikimedia's strategy and mission.
  • $US75,000 - flexible grant last year
  • 50/50 split in revenue
  • $US100,000 budgeted for this year
  • $US50,000 reserved for priority areas of funding
  • Start-up funding for new chapters
  • Organisation development (legal advice, research, consultants etc)
  • Capacity building - prefer to fund planning rather than actually doing it to ensure it can be done well.
  • GLAM: The foundation has no plans to hire someone to work with the GLAM sector. The foundation sees working with the cultural industries as a responsibility of the chapters.
  • Large scale projects: concerned with scale and approaches for national initiatives on a larger sale, even at a higher expense.
  • Prefer chapters think on a larger scale with a higher impact.
  • Individuals may apply on a case-by-case basis unattached to a chapter if there is an existing trust relationship if there is no local chapter. If there is a local chapter, it's preferred individuals work with their chapters and submit a grant application as a chapter initiative.
  • May 15 is deadline for this year's grant applications, but there is some flexibility. Applications will be accepted after May 15 but may not be processed quickly.

Other funding: Collaborative models

  • Chapters can consider working on joint-projects together to spread the financial burden.
  • For foundation grants, co-operation between chapters on funding projects is more complex and complicated for the foundation than just funding the project.
  • May 14-16: UK Fundraising Meeting
  • Open Society

Working group: External Communication

I went to the External Communication working group while Andrew went to the Education working group.

  • The External Communication group discussed a wide range of communication issues and ideas. It was a round table discussion so was very informal.
  • Most people felt chapter reps involved in or otherwise interested in external communication (answering chapter's out-going mail, contact and enquiry email etc to the public and the media should be regularly discussing ideas, issues, etc. Some felt we should be using the communication mailing list, but it was also suggested we should have a dedicated mailing list for discussing chapter's external communication issues, ideas and projects.
  • Catrin shared information about some of Wikimedia Germany's communication projects, their approach to working with the media and their publications, including the Medium newspaper.
  • We discussed various strategies and approaches for dealing with the media, such as being more proactive, following up on issues, suggesting story ideas etc.
  • We also discussed information kits and other publications. Several chapters brought examples of some of their publications, which varied from small publications such as Poland's booklet through to photo postcards with the very basic chapter information on the back.
  • This was a really beneficial working group for me and I made a lot of useful contacts and got some great ideas to think over.

Working group: Organisational

Movement roles task force

  • Strategy report to the board

Key stakeholders

  1. WMF
  2. Wikimedia chapters
  3. Chapters committee
  4. Unaffiliated volunteers and informal groups (people looking for any organisational participation or recognition that is currently not there)

Desired end result

  • A document clearly defining roles and responsibilities within the Wikimedia organisation which can be agreed upon by all key stakeholders.
  • A proposal on how to move forward with the organisational development.
  • Time-frame goal would be to have an end result by Summer 2011.

Time line

  • April 2010: Communicating our intentions, talking to chapters and chapcom and devising a way to include the unaffiliated volunteers.
  • May 2010: Finalising the "organisational development" process proposal (lead: Arne and Jan-Bart)
  • June 2010: Decision by the board and creation of project team
  • July 2010: Wikimania - Start of the project
  • Late 2010: Progress report
  • Spring 2010: Substantial draft document
  • Wikimania 2011: Charter signing

Working group: Case Studies

Wikimedia Nederlands case study – Wiki Loves Bieb

  • Wikimedia and libraries share a similar goal which can be exploited for mutual gain.
  • Areas of work:
  • Media Literacy
  • Local cultural heritage
  • Including links between library expertise and collections and relevant and appropriate Wikipedia articles
  • Commissioned by the Dutch Association of Public Libraries
  • Libraries provide the resources - funding and staff
  • Role of Wikimedia NL:
  • Provide information for library staff about Wikimedia and the projects.
  • Provide feedback on the materials and formats that are being developed.
  • Attend relevant meetings organised by libraries.

Basic Principle: Scalability

  • All materials, formats and best practices must be transferable and usable in other libraries and cities.
  • All materials and formats will be tested.

Media literacy

Target groups:

  • Teachers
  • Students aged 14-18

Material and formats

  • Brochure “Wikipedia i skolan” by Lennat Guldbrandsson
  • Guest lesson/workshop format
  • Video
  • "Teach the teacher" workshops
  • Lesson plans
  • Evaluation
  • Editing is not the focus or goal. Rather, the focus is the proper use of Wikipedia as a source of information.

Local heritage

  • Bringing Wikimedia and local heritage institutions together.
  • Producing printed information materials for cultural heritage institutions.
  • Evaluation

Linking to the library

  • Link own collections
  • Linking library collections as references and sources
  • Can library expertise be used for help desk functions?
  • Initiatives like German Personendatei

Wiki-expedition by Wikimedia Poland

The wiki-expedition is a photo-collecting project. The idea was first developed by Australian Wikimedians (who may/may not have actually gone ahead with it!).

A group of people in various vehicles travel around taking photos for the Wikimedia projects in order to fill specific gaps in content.

Project statistics

  • 15 people participated, mostly Wikimedians and people from Open Street Map, Polish Storm Hunters and support provided by local guides.
  • Ocurred over 10 days, and involved 3 main bases.
  • Used four cars and eight bicycles.

Preparation

  • Research and route planning – based on Wikipedia information and Open Street map data.
  • Made contacts with local institutions.

Budget

  • Budget was 16,000 PLN (3800 euros)
  • Actually spent 10,000 PLN

Results

  • 2300 pictures uploaded
  • 500 pictures used on Polish WP
  • 200 articles expanded
  • Cost of each picture averaged around 5PLN or 1.1 euro
  • Several workshops for future editors
  • Made contacts with local photographers
  • Received lots of press interest and coverage – radio, TV, newspapers.

Institutional partnerships

On Sunday, I attended the Institutional Partnership session and Andrew went to the Professionalisation session.

  • Wikimedia projects and cultural institutions have a significant overlap of mission, the primary differences being Wikimedia’s freeness and cultural institutions are slow, old, and relatively opaque in contents.
  • Wikimedia can benefit from institution’s depth of holdings and curators knowledge and skills.
  • Cultural institutions can benefit from Wikimedia’s reach and free, volunteer labor.

Examples of projects

  • Wikimedia De: German Federal Archive – released 100,000 images to Commons.
  • Wikimedia France: French National Library has agreed to provide text of PD works in the collection.
  • Wikimedia Australia: Powerhouse museum, GLAM-WIKI, etc.
  • Wikimedia Nederlands: partnership with museum to release images.

Benefits of partnerships between Wikimedia and cultural institutions

  • Wikimedia benefits from:
  • Newly liberated text and images expand coverage of topics.
  • Enrichment and addition of context for existing articles
  • Existing articles become more effective with the addition of museum images, text etc.
  • Improved perception of the Wikimedia movement among the cultural industries sector.
  • Institutions benefit from:
  • Exposure of their content, their existence, their websites and resources.
  • Improvement of metadata by Wikimedians
  • Free identification and correction of errors by Wikimedians going through the holdings. German archive now employs a full time staff member to deal with corrections from Wikimedians.
  • linking their own holdings with free content.

(From Erik)Be aware that Institutions may have a very narrow focus and budget, so don’t over-estimate the alignment or fit with Wikimedia’s mission. Important to figure out mission fit very early on.

Copyright reform

Wikimedia Foundation's role is to support the chapters and provide the infrastructure. The foundation wont become an advocacy body but wants the chapters to become vocal voices in local and global copyright reform.

Report of the Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees meeting

  • Jan-Bart, Ting Chen, Arne Klempert, SJ in Berlin.
  • 6 out of 10 board members didn't make it to Berlin.
  • Four-fold increase in the Foundation's staff.
  • Establishing movement roles.
  • Governance committee started yesterday, comprising of Matt, Ting and Jan-Bart
  • Found chapter meeting more positive than last year
  • Wish to bring the board closer to the Wikimedia movement and the community.

Outcomes of Chapter Meeting

  • Importance of outreach – outreach.wikimedia.org
  • Experience and idea sharing
  • Realisation Wikimedia has matured as an organisation
  • Wiki takes the World
  • Chapters kit - for helping guide new chapters through the process
  • Education project ideas
  • Ideas for both small and mature chapters
  • Meet like-minded people from all over the world
  • Working group sessions helpful
  • Learning how other chapters work
  • Meeting people in person
  • Develop and share ideas about working with developing countries
  • Develop and share ideas about working with institutions
  • Exchanging methods, projects, ideas etc.
  • Talk about frustrations!

Wikimedia Asia-Pacific Alliance

Informal Asia-Pacific Alliance meeting

Andrew and I were invited to attend a short meeting with other chapters in our region after the formal meetings were over. There were about a dozen people there, including Ting Chen.

It seems to be generally desirable among chapters to form some kind of alliance among chapters in the Asia-Pacific region.

A mailing list has been set up to discuss the idea and related issues.

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