Wiki Loves Monuments brainstorm

This page is kept as an archival reference.If you want to raise a point about it, please start a discussion thread on the community forum.

Wiki Loves Monuments ran very successfully in a number of countries across Europe in 2011.

Wiki Loves Monuments brainstorm - In a nutshell When: Saturday 18 February 2012; 13:00 Where: Development House, Leonard Street, London, EC2A 4LT (the WMUK office) What: Brainstorm meeting to identify opportunities and to discuss project management for a Wiki Loves Monuments in the UK Hashtag: #wikilovesmonuments Wikimedia Commons category: Category:2012 UK Wiki Loves Monuments brainstorm Documentation: /Notes (copied from etherpad) and /Detailed discussion

Background

Britain need no longer be grey!

Wiki Loves Monuments is a photo contest organized in 2010 and 2011 in, respectively, the Netherlands and in 18 European countries. The contest asks the general audience to upload pictures of monumental/historical sites and buildings during September. It is organised in every country that participates separately by the local people who best know how things work there, and the best photos are nominated for an international contest.

In 2011 this contest was very successful, with more than 165,000 photos submitted. This because of the hard work of the hundreds of volunteers in the 18 countries who helped organize Wiki Loves Monuments in one way or another, working with a number of local and national partner organisations. The winning pictures per country are at www.wikilovesmonuments.eu. The event had over 4,000 people who had never uploaded an image to Wikimedia Commons before.

Outcome and workshop notes

Participants were User:Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry, User:Charles Matthews, User:Effeietsanders, User:Fæ, User:HJ Mitchell, User:Jdforrester, User:Johnbod, User:Maculosae tegmine lyncis, User:Marek69, User:Mrjohncummings, User:Prioryman, User:Rock drum, User:The wub, User:WereSpielChequers.

The outcome was the setting up of a steering group, with power to co-opt, consisting of:

• User:HJ Mitchell
• User:Johnbod
• User:Jdforrester
• User:Marek69
• User:WereSpielChequers.

Notes and records of the meeting - See etherpad for the feed from the workshop, and Wiki Loves Monuments brainstorm/Detailed discussion and Wiki Loves Monuments brainstorm/Notes for fuller notes to the event. Do we need to pull these together to make a single record?

Older discussion

Volunteers and Participants

Please sign up below! Please also leave a rough estimate of how much your travel costs to get to the meeting will be, and whether there are any specific elements you are interested in.

• Effeietsanders 11:42, 4 December 2011 (UTC) I'll be coming in from the Netherlands and will hopefully share my experiences and ideas from organizing Wiki Loves Monuments 2010 and 2011.
• Andy Mabbett; travel costs tbc; especially interested in OpenStreetMap liaison (they've already covered a lot of this ground, at least in the West Midlands)
• Rod Interested in listed buildings, industrial & archaeological history + liaison with local museums (Somerset/Bristol). Unlikely to be able to travel to f2f meeting due to health issues amongst my family.
• WereSpielChequers Have been doing a lot of categorisation of Geograph images on Commons. As that project has over ten times as many images from a much smaller area than WLM I'm intrigued to see how we can run WLM in the UK in a way that fills in gaps rather than replicates what we have. Travel costs would be a day ticket from London all zones to Manchester if Manchester turns out to be the most cost effective locale for the people who sign up. Also wondering whether we should run a UK based Olympics project instead for 2012.
• Harry Mitchell. Travel costs ~£30. I was involved in preliminary discussions about WLM at GLAMcamp Amsterdam and have quite a bit of experience in outreach, including a little event-running experience.
• Fæ just Oyster charges from Zone 2. Was part of discussion at GLAMsterdam, discussions with OSM (Harry W.), discussions with Peter W. on use of Hasselblad, discussed Domesday book opportunity with Roger B. and have discussed a photography week in Scotland as part of our Museums Galleries Scotland partnership. So lots to discuss.
• Rich Farmbrough. Would cost about £80, distance about 240 miles round trip. Rich Farmbrough, 19:36, 7 December 2011 (UTC).
  
• John Cummings Travel cost £51, from Newport. Really interested in geotagging of photos, mapping and outreach especially with schools and setting up a Wikimeet in Wales and arranging Wikipedian in Residence for places. I'm organising Monmouthpedia
• Johnbod Travel costs from Sarf London - £7.50 ? at 2012 prices.
• Charles Matthews Travel at £20 from Cambridge.
• Victuallers 22:49, 24 January 2012 (UTC) c. £100 train from Derby depending on the deal - car share a possibility. Want to make sure we use our volunteer efforts wisely. We do have a lot of stuff we are not using. However this may get us more editors or cleverer tools or more use of existing pages ... now that is interesting.
• Jdforrester; nil travel costs.
• Prioryman; no costs.
• Rock drum
• Maculosae tegmine lyncis (no costs)
• the wub Travel costs roughly £10

Apologies

• Mike Peel - sorry I can't make this. :-(
• Jon Davies WMUK 12:37, 15 February 2012 (UTC) - Hope it goes well and that the sandwiches are OK!
• Lokal_Profil - Thesis writing is stealing all available time =(
• LoopZilla Generally interested in the project, and particularly in the issues raised by WereSpielChequers above. Sadly cannot attend.

Discussion topics

• Databases of monuments
  • Depending on the definition of monument.. quite a lot of work was done on WikiProject:Historic Sites identifying suitable registers & databases - could this meeting look at which are suitable for inclusion & make contact with English Heritage etc to find out if records etc are in a compatible format ( I can't find the discussion re what formats they are in. eg EH spatial data).Rodw 12:37, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
    • I did write "officially" to English Heritage in June 2011 about how much we would legitimately take from their website (in my mind was a bot or scraping tools). My email and the reply is in the footnote. It may be helpful to arrange a face to face meeting with English Heritage and those public bodies for Scotland and Ireland to discuss our plans and elicit their active support, once we have something solid written up. --Fæ 12:59, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• Mixed experience of upload/content outreach projects may make this not automatically a good thing depending on execution.
  • As the main target of lobbying by the WLM active members at GLAMcamp NY and GLAMcamp NL, I have a range of views. Most of which have been discussed with other members of this list at wikimeets. There have been some early discussions for a COM:scotwiki inter-chapter photography week in Scotland next year but this has yet to shape into a real plan. I would be more than happy to support a team wanting to lead WLM UK (or a more federal alternative) as long as the partnering and d/b copyright issues are managed and previous experiences of UK mass upload projects with a poor outcome for ensuring "usage" of Commons images is firmly addressed in any outreach strategy. --Fæ 12:15, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
• Is there any way to prioritise those on this list?Rodw 12:37, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Probably not, as it seems mostly out of date anyway. The first 2 Suffolk pages I looked at seemed out of date - eg Alpheton, and "monuments" are not specified. Another white elephan't graveyard here I suspect. Johnbod 15:55, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Topic list

Some points that should probably be covered (also see talk page):

• Introduction (by Lodewijk) of the concept
• Q&A on the concept
• Proposed timeline
• Inventory/brainstorm of opportunities/potential issues in the UK (not: solving everything)
  • Brainstorm on what 'special' things extra could be done in the UK regarding cooperation with UK institutions, communities and government.
• Inventory/brainstorm of what is needed to organize it in the UK (material and immaterial) and what would be the most critical steps
• Risks
• Outcomes of the meeting and reporting back

Suggested Agenda

Start: 13:00 End: 17:30 (times are indicative)

• Welcome, coffee, stroopwafels
• Introduction by Lodewijk
• Q&A
• Timeline

14:00 - 5 min break

• Inventarization:
  • Opportunities brainstorm
  • Potential issues & allocate problem owners where needed
  • Local - make it scale

15:10 - 10 min break

• So what would be needed to make this work in the UK?
• What would be the most important next steps I

16:45 break

• Most important next steps
• Discuss general viability
• Summarize outcomes and action points + homework

If time's left over: develop some more specific cool ideas

Comments

• When is the best time for the meeting? We've suggested 1-5pm above - but could we start earlier, or finish later? Mike Peel 11:40, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
  • If people are travelling by train off-peak (ie after 09:30ish), then 1pm is probably the most sensible time to start; if WMUK are happy to pay more for peak-time travel to get people there then we could aim for a 10:00/10:30 start. On another note, if we're just having a discussion (and not anything that requires, it might be worth having it at the Liverpool meetup on 28 January—co-locating it with a meetup might attract more people (but I don't know if you were planning to hold it earlier than the 28th, Mike). HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 22:46, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
    • We're planning on holding the meeting on a day over the weekend, rather than a weekday, so that those with full-time jobs/studies can attend without having to take time off. And there's no peak travel times over weekend... Coinciding with a wikimeet sounds like a good idea - I'll leave a comment on the talk page about the date though. The downside with having the meeting in Liverpool is that it's more difficult for people to reach, though, since it means people from Glasgow/London/Birmingham would have to change trains in Manchester Piccadilly to get to Liverpool. That would be manageable if it would result in a higher attendance level, though. Mike Peel 01:00, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

• Our friend Multichill has done some great background research at Commons:User:Multichill/Monuments_notes. Perhaps this can be recreated as a sub-page here for further refinement or comment? I'm a bit limited in access myself until the end of the month. We may need to take a good look at copyright or potential database rights issues (if any) with each of these sources. Thanks --Fæ 22:22, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi all, I can recommend that the best contacts at EH would be Keith May and Hugh Corley. Feel free to mention my name when contacting them or forward something through me to co-sign? Looking forward to seeing what happens with this! Wish I could help more... PatHadley 16:24, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

I saw Hugh and Keith in the pub last night and they know to expect contact. Hugh said he's been in touch with Fae before he thinks? PatHadley 10:23, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I've actually met both of them before, EH has been a long, long term prospect waiting for the right moment. --Fæ 16:54, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Oops. Sorry if I've jumped the gun in any way. Just looked through the etherpad. Plans look good :) PatHadley 11:20, 19 February 2012 (UTC)