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Special story

European GLAMwiki Coordinators meeting

By Wittylama
meta:user:Astinson (WMF) presenting a the Structured Data on Commons & Wikicite projects in the UNESCO roundtable meeting-room

In mid-February, 30+ representatives from Wikimedia affiliate organisations met at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris for the second European GLAMwiki Coordinators meeting, convened by Europeana. They share skills and best practices, coordinated projects, and consolidated connections between parts of our movement that work in parallel but often not together.

The Garden of Peace, UNESCO HQ

This meeting attracted twice the number of participants as the inaugural meeting of this series in 2015. The two day meeting (plus one day of workshops at the Wikimedia France office) attracted a diverse range of attendees - from Finland to Tunisia, Ireland to Macedonia; from delegated volunteers of User-groups to Executive Directors of Chapters; and from new community members and people with long experience in cultural partnership program. Guest presentations were also given by representatives of the European Space Agency, the Smithsonian Institution, Histropedia, as well as Europeana and UNESCO. Notably different from 2015, both geographic and thematic user groups were specifically invited to attend - such as the Bulgarian and Wikisource community User Groups. 50% of attendees were employees of Wikimedia affiliates/WMF, 8% were volunteer affiliate board members, and 25% volunteer community members designated to attend on behalf of their affiliate.

1/3 of all attendees were women (consistent with the 2015 event despite there being double the total number of attendees) and 92% of attendees reported as feeling completely comfortable to participate whenever they wished (the other 8% reported some difficulties with the speed/difficulty level of English language).

Presentations

Various formats of presentation were included in the program. There was a very high level of active participation: 67% of all attendees gave a full presentation or led a workshop, 42% gave a "lightning-talk" and 38% self-reported as having give "many" comments in the discussion sections.

Aside from those already mentioned, just some of the other contributions included:

Presentations

Workshops

Not to be outdone, our host John Cummings gave an deceptively-simply titled presentation "Reusing open license text and other new things developed at UNESCO" showcasing the wide variety of Wikimedia and open-access activities he had been involved in at UNESCO during his Wikipedian in Residence period thus far.

To see the full list of presentations and any slides/online documentation, visit the event program.


All in all, 92% of attendees said that the meeting was relevant/very relevant to their role, 96% rated the event as high/very high quality, and most importantly, 96% believe that this event series should be continued in 2019/20!

With thanks to

  • UNESCO - for generously hosting the event
  • Wikimedia Foundation - for its grant funding the attendance of 7 community members who would not have otherwise been able to participate
  • Wikimedia Nederland - for its time and effort in providing Fiscal Sponsorship of that grant, at no cost to the movement
  • Wikimedia France - for hosting the workshops and arranging local logistics

and to all the Wikimedia Affiliates to sent their representatives to attend!


Report compiled by Liam Wyatt, GLAMwiki Coordinator for Europeana, convenor of the 2015 & 2017 coordinators meetings. All statistics are drawn from the post-event participant survey. A version of this report is also published in the Europeana Pro blog.


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