New subject: [glam] The Europeana Awareness project and Wikimedia Sweden

23 May 2012

Sorry for cross-posting. 

Dear
everybody,

My name is John
Andersson and I have recently been hired by Wikimedia Sweden (WMSE)
as the Event manager for the project Europeana Awareness[1], a
project that amongst other things has the goal of creating a closer
cooperation between the Europeana Foundation (and its vast network of
GLAM institutions) and the Wikimedia community and by doing so increase awareness of the
work done by Europeana (hence the project name). The project leader for
WMSE's part of the Europeana Awareness is Lennart Guldbrandsson,
a.k.a. User:Hannibal, who many of you already know. I will however be
responsible for the day-to-day operations.

First of all I would
like to give you a short presentation about myself so that you know
who I am (if this understandably bores you, you can skip the
following paragraph) and secondly I will present the projects that I
will work with during the coming 18 months. 

I
will start working full time on the 11th
of
June but until then I am working merely 35 percent as I am currently
at the very end of my university studies at the Master programme in
European Studies at Gothenburg University, finishing up my Master's
thesis that focuses on decision-making in the Arctic Council's
working groups. This time last year I worked as a trainee at the
European Parliament's Secretariat in Brussels for 5.5 months and from
before that I have a Bachelor of Science from Umeå University.
During my Bachelor I spent one semester in the U.S. as an exchange
student. I have been an administrator on the Swedish language version
for 6 years now and have contributed with hundreds of articles and
photos. On a more personal note I enjoy learning new things,
experiencing new cultures, traveling, meeting friends and reading a
good book. 

Two major tasks that
I will work with are firstly the co-organization of a number of GLAM
conferences in some of the European countries that have active
Wikimedia Chapters that are working with GLAM issues, as well as to
organize a European wide competition called Wiki Loves Public Art
(WLPA), obviously inspired by the super successful Wiki Loves
Monument competition. 

I am hoping to help
in organizing events in Sweden, Poland, UK, France, Germany, the
Netherlands and Belgium. Currently I am working on organizing the
first event, an Edit-a-thon in Leuven, Belgium.[2] If
you are planning to organize a GLAM event in any of these countries I
hope that you will take the opportunity to contact me and discuss how
I could help! For example, adding Europeana as a partner for the
event that you are organizing is likely to open new doors and attract
more institutions and I am the one to contact about that, I could
also help out with man-hours, perhaps supply you with information,
contacts and digitized media that Europeana already has (which could
be hard and time consuming to collect) or suggest and contact
international guests that could participate in your event.

The organization of
Wiki Loves Public Art will mainly take place later this year. But
even though this event is far in the future I hope that you write me
an email if you think that this sounds interesting and would like to
get involved in this work. I am well aware that this will take a lot
of time and effort to organize so we might as well start with some
initial planning as soon as possible!

I
am super excited about working with this full time and I really look
forward meeting and talking with all of you!

Sincerely,

John Andersson
Wikimedia Sweden
Event manager, Europeana Awareness

User names: User:John Andersson (WMSE) (work) and User:Jopparn (private)

Email: JohnAndersson86(a)hotmail.com
Skype: johnandersson86

[1]
See http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Projekt:Europeana_Awareness
for more information. Currently only available in Swedish.
[2]
See
http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Projekt:Europeana_Awareness/Europeana_meets_Wo…