A working group on cultural heritage has recently become active. The group has made contacts with the Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE), which is the national organization for cultural heritage in the Netherlands. As a result of this, the RCE has agreed to donate an exhaustive database with the geographical locations and more metadata of the over 60.000 national monuments in the Netherlands for use in Wikimedia projects. The working group is currently processing this data and inserting it into the Dutch language Wikipedia at a rapid pace, so that it can be used in Wikipedia articles, but also in other project such as Wiki loves monuments (a photohunt competition akin to Wiki(pedia) loves art). As the group progresses, omissions and errors that are found in this data can be corrected, and the improved data is made available to the RCE again. The RCE has also offered to help in answering questions that might arise when processing the data and when writing articles on Dutch cultural heritage.
With general elections in sight and a new European Commission in place, two board members have taken the lead in setting up a working group on copyright lobbying. As copyright legislation is under reconsideration at various levels at this moment, now seems a good time to try and influence these developments in a favorable direction for free culture.
On the Dutch language Wikipedia, volunteers have been working on creating extensive and complete lists of all national monuments in the Netherlands, sorted by location. They also try to add for each monument at least one photo under a free license. There are more than 60.000 monuments in the Netherlands, and to help get a freely licensed photo for each of them, a photo competition will be organized. The contest, Wiki loves monuments, will be organized in September by Wikimedia Netherlands together with the volunteers from the Cultural Heritage project. The general public will be encouraged to visit monuments during that month and take photographs of them for use on Wikipedia. Photos will be uploaded through a special project website, and appealing prizes will be available for outstanding photographs.
Esther Hoorn participated the EDRi workshop in Brussels at begin of February on behalf of WMNL. The workshop was about lobbying on a European level, and aside from sharing her experience on copyright, she has made some useful contacts.
Together with the Public Library of Vlissingen, WMNL has initiated a pilot project on media literacy and local cultural heritage that should lead to a closer cooperation between Wikimedia and libraries. The topic on media literacy will involve the development of educational material for schools on the use of Wikipedia. For example, the booklet "Wikipedia i skolan" (by Lennart Gulbrandsson) is being translated and adapted from Swedish for use in Dutch education.
To give candidate board members an opportunity to get to know the association and each other a bit better, Wikimedia Nederland organized a board interest meeting a few weeks before the elections at the annual general assembly. Based on this meeting, they could then decide whether they wanted to actually put themselves up as a candidate or not.
In March, the Annual General Assembly was held, and therefore also elections for a new board. Four board members from the previous board were re-elected and two new board members were elected out of eight total candidates.
Although there is no direct involvement in this decision by WMNL, we think it is good to mention that the Dutch Government launched its new website, www.rijksoverheid.nl, in April under CC-Zero! This not only includes the text, but also the images and video available on that website.
On the SPE Intelligent Energy Conference 2010 in Utrecht, board members Hay and José gave presentations on how Wikipedia and Wikimedia let people collaborate. Hay attended a conference on digitization in libraries where he gave a presentation on free licenses and collaborative authoring.
Organized by the Institute for Network Cultures, this two day conference about the academic study of Wikipedia took place in the public library of Amsterdam on Friday 26 and Saturday 27 March. A number of Wikipedia editors and WMNL board members attended the conference. Videos of the sessions are available at this page.