GLAMcamp London

I love me a good GLAMcamp and when I was given the opportunity to spend a weekend at the British Library with some general GLAM-Wiki types, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to try and share the essence of the event with you in this post, rather than the nitty gritty of what happened. If that’s more your thing, head over to the WMDE blog and check out Kilian Kluge’s fantastic post there.

Like with all GLAMcamps, I think that this weekend was just as much about the social aspect of the Wikimedia movement.¹ We’re a community that operates almost exclusively online (although outreach projects like GLAM are an exception to that) and events such as this are a fantastic way to refresh your interest in the community, meeting people you’ve worked with online can make future interactions with them much easier.

Two attendees discuss general GLAM-ourousness at the British Library.

It was fantastic to meet up with people I’d talked with at Wikimania and others who hadn’t been able to make it to DC. We also went to Platform nine and three quarters at King’s Cross. Which was pretty awesome.

One of the biggest outcomes of the event was planning for a GLAM Bootcamp. This was meant to be a way of “Making more Multichills“; it came from the idea of some sort of one-to-one training (in which Maarten would take trainees into the forest for training in Freedom of Panorama and rabbit-skinning, or something).

Anyway, GLAMcamp was great – as always. Where next?

Footnotes:
¹ Still not MySpace, though!

My Wikimania 2012

So I’ve been in Washington, D.C for the past few days for Wikimania 2012. I’ve never been to a Wikimania before so it’s been really interesting and exciting.

It all began on Thursday evening at the Library of Congress. I was told that it was meant to represent all the world’s knowledge and it did that pretty well; the intricate paintwork and marble that covered the roof and walls brought a brightness to the old building. There was a small music group (2 violins, double bass, accordian) playing and a seemingly bottomless supply of food brought out by bow tie-wearing waiters and waitresses. I got to chat to loads of cool people (some Wikimedia-y, some not) and eat some good food.

The Capitol at sunset, from the LoC. (not my photo)

Thursday, the first day of the main conference began with Mary Gardiner’s keynote. She made several good points about editor retention and increased participation (hopefully I’ll have a blogpost vaguely related to this, soon). Jimmy’s “State of the Wiki” presentation included some of his choice fundraiser banner parodies and gave out his now-annual “Wikipedian of the Year” and “WMF employee of the year” awards.

There were loads of good talks on various topics. The only problem I’ve noticed with the conference is a lack of chairs in the non-theatre rooms.

In the evening, I went to a GLAM networking event at the Newseum. I started talking to some men from the Library of Congress but I got confused when they started debating the difference between modern and contemporary art. Apparently the early 20th century is modern and since then is contemporary. I don’t even… what?

Jonathan Morgan draws a dinosaur on his badge during Wikimania 2012.

There were more good talks on Friday and at the end I headed over to the Wikia metup for free Pizza and T-shirts (W00t).

Saturday began with an opening plenary from Sue Gardner. She talked about the decline in editors and touched on the feedback dashboard (which is occasionally much lulz).

After our “WikiMen’s lunch” (because the women were all elsewhere) I headed over to finish off preparing for a QRpedia workshop that I had been co-opted to help out with. I had fun sharing what I knew about QRpedia with those there and live-tweeting the session from the @QRpedia Twitter account (which you should definitely go and follow if you don’t already)

From what some of the attendees said we can expect some great new QRpedia installations soon.

I’m off now to the closing party at Buffalo Billiards. I’ll see anyone who’s going there and hopefully everyone else at a Wikimedia event soon!

GLAMcamp NYC – Day 3

The last day of GLAMcamp took place in the Mid-Manhattan branch of the NYPL, because SIBL was shut. Although several specific activites had been scheduled to happen, the day was mostly spent writing (even more) documentation and working on a metrics proposal.The group set out towards Mid-Manhattan and thirty minutes and one geocache later, we turned up and got to work. There was limited space so parallel sessions were pretty much out of the question.

What's "Oil on ice"?

The news about the eruption in Iceland caused some worry (and much tweeting, in case you didn’t know about it) amongst the attendees, although – to my knowledge – those that left day all returned home safely.

The day’s events began with a short demonstration from Wikimedia Foundation developer Ryan Kaldari of his new mass-upload tool. Conference attendees said they had “a tear in their eye” as he showed it in action.

The renovation of the GLAM portal was one of the main tasks that day with many new features implemented that day. A few others worked on new “How-to” pages and Q&As. A third set of people concentrated on a proposal (to be given to the relevant authority, probably the Foundation) on getting decent metrics for articles.

For lunch, we wandered out to a nearby market where people chose gyro, kebab and crepe. Not all at the same time, you understand.

Working parties were once again formed in the afternoon with the portal taking on a new tab header and layout. More work was also done on the metrics proposal.

The last presentation of the day was given by Maarten Dammers who spoke about the proposal his group had been working on that day. We discussed options for the funding the development of the metrics system, before a final plenary session took place in which conference convener, Liam Wyatt assigned roles as leaders and coordinators of the projects that had taken place over the weekend.

There is talk of another possible GLAMcamp, which will likely be held in Europe. Until then, happy editing.

GLAMcamp NYC – Day 2

Despite being jet lagged, (in some cases) hungover and eating breakfast in a room full of lively girl scouts, the GLAMorists made their way towards SIBL for another day of collaboration, sugary cupcakes and innuendo.

The day was much more laid-back than the previous one, although was no-less productive. My group kept working on the glamwiki.org main page, and movse on to working on its subpages and beginning work on the case studies. Nina Paley dropped in before the session ended and talked to us for a bit, and gave some of us badges!

Been there, done that, got a badge from Nina Paley.

After lunch, we got back to geeking out discussion on the idea of a free culture index. 2 hours and a load of innuendo later, we  had decided to - rather than rating museums ourselves – let them give themselves an award, probably something along the lines of the HTML5 one. We needed images to go in the little widget though. Who could do that? The foundation? Possibly, but unlikely. “I’ll do it.” said Nina Paley. “Fetch me an iPad.”

During the last session, we all totally-geeked out, discussing metrics and tools. I have to admit that I didn’t actually understand half of the stuff that was being discussed, but you could tell that the people talking did, which was handy.

No sign of the rapture so I guess we’ll be back tomorrow.

GLAMcamp NYC – Day 1

Well… what can I say? I’ve done so much and met so many people it’s hard to remember everything.

The day began with a public workshop, which had around 60 attendees, from various GLAMs, the government and a representative from Yale, who have recently released the contents of their digital archive into the public domain.

We all split up into several groups where questions were asked by the attendees and the Wikimedians helped them out.

From then until lunch, the group discussed what we wanted to achieve that day. The main areas of interest were GLAM ambassadors, tools and documentation.

Richard Knipel (Pharos) suggested that the Wikipedia Ambassador program and GLAM Ambassador program be completely merged. This was met with mixed opinions from the groupwith discussions straying into whether the term “GLAM Ambassaor” was an appropriate title. “E-volunteer” and “Local contact” were both suggested as alternatives.

For the final session, people concentrated on one thing: Documentation. However, as it spans such a broad spectrum, groups were formed which concentrated on several things including guides, FAQs and updating the glamwiki.org front page. I have to say, it looks pretty cool, now.

The evening was spent on a tour of the Met, looking at the photography department before geting insiders’ tours from two experts.

Bring on Saturday.