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!

A very Dutch weekend in Amsterdam – Day 2 (Saturday)

This post is going up quite late but I wanted to share the awesome-ness of GLAMcamp Amsterdam. For more information on the event see the page on Meta or subscribe to This Month in GLAM (there’s going to be a report on the weekend!).

Saturday was the day we really started doing things. The first item on the schedule was lightning talks. I was third up and presented (for 5 minutes – it was a lightning talk) on This Month in GLAM. It was only as I finished that Liam told me I was running a session on Sunday (we Wikimedians don’t leave things to the last minute, though), on the newsletter. You can see my slides here.

There were lots of sessions during the day which focussed on a plethora of different issues and topics. There’s not much point in recording them all here as there are summaries on the etherpads for each session (linked to from the schedule) but I’d like to talk briefly about a couple of them.

I didn’t really take part in the first two lots of sessions because I was busy finishing off the November edition of This Month in GLAM. The QRpedia session after lunch was great in introducing those new to the codes and Andy Mabbet (who was running the session) talked a little about how/where they’re currently in use (apparently the occupy movement are – cool or what?).

A Wikipedian ponders something too deep for words at the Amsterdam Museum.

In the evening we were treated to a private tour of the Amsterdam Museum. Following an introduction from the general director of the museum, we split up into groups. Each group started in a different place and then moved onto another area.

My group began in the archives where we were shown the old system of using cards to document every item in their collection, and their new digital system (their objects database is available online). Maarten (yes, a fourth Maarten) who worked there also told us they will on ocasion refuse objects which don’t have an Amsterdam collection.

We were also shown the new “Amsterdam DNA codes”: QR codes on the back of the guide booklet (which was available in multiple languages) which when scanned would play a short film about a certain topic in the language of the booklet. Cool, eh?

They also had an interactive exhibit which involved the use of what looked like Kinect to select things on a screen.

The day ended with a dinner at a nearby restaurant, with the museum staff who had lead the tours.

A very Dutch weekend in Amsterdam – Part 1 (Friday)

This post is going up a little late but I wanted to share the awesome-ness of GLAMcamp Amsterdam. For more information on the event see the page on Meta.

As I stepped through the plastic flaps that formed the front door of the MediaMatic Lab, Liam Wyatt bounded up to me “Welcome to the mushroom factory!” It was certainly an unusual venue; one wall was covered in around 6kg (if I remember correctly) of mouldy tomato paste and a sterile laboratory-like area had been created (I’m told they hold the magic mushroom-making courses in there). The current exhibition there is about fungus: they’re exploring different forms of fungi. A sign by the door warned of death if anyone with an immune deficiency disorder entered the building. Luckily the weekend remained free of casualties and after a brief introduction from conference conveners Jessica Tangelder and Liam Wyatt, the attendees had a chance to say a little about themselves.

Is this even legal?

Wikimedia Nederland had printed some books about their Wiki loves Art series of events they held all over the country in 2009. We were warned to pick one up before the museum-ists arrived that afternoon for the public workshop. But before then, we were given a presentation by the team behind the GLAM-Wiki toolset project, which aims to provide both an effective mass-upload system (Maarten Dammers doesn’t scale. Sorry, Maarten.) and decent metrics for images used.

After the first of what turned out to be one of three very impressive lunch spreads, attendees of the public workshop started arriving. Done in a way very different to the one held as part of GLAMcamp NYC in May, the public workshop focused more on talks and networking than actually introducing them to the rubrics of Wikipedia collaboration, partnerships, projects.

The evening ended with everyone walking to “de Balie” for drinks and dinner. A group eventually ended up having a “beer mat flipping competition” (Liam won with… 26! People were rendered speechless – and beer mat-less, too.)

GLAMcamp Amsterdam – This time it’s… in Holland

I couldn’t think of anything terribly witty to put as a title. Sorry.

This post is going to be about next weekend’s GLAMcamp (yes, GLAMcamps do seem to be all I blog about – tell me if you’ve got any better ideas). The inaugural event in New York this past May was relatively small in comparison to what this will be like: the 25 attendees there seemed like an adequately-sized group for the tasks in hand. This time there are over 50 Wikimedians coming – and a larger “to-do” list.

As I said in my post way back in April, GLAMcamps are a really great way of getting GLAM work done – in one go. Suggested tasks include:

• What happens in 2012 – “Where do we go from here?”
• Documentation (yay!)
• The mass upload and metrics stuff that I didn’t understand when they talked about it in NYC and I don’t understand now.
• Revamping glamwiki.org.
• A “freedom declaration” which GLAMs would hypothetically sign, to do with copyright.
• Wiki Loves Monuments

The event is also bringing together Wikimedians from 21 different countries: India, Philippines, Kenya, Australia, USA, Canada, Serbia, Israel, Chile, Denmark, UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Czech Republic, Poland, Macedonia, and Sweden. (To think there were only a measly 8 countries represented in NYC!)

See you all in Amsterdam. (That sounds so clichéd.)