Hello all!
I'd like to re-open the conversation about the GLAM-Wiki US Consortium [1] and thank those of you who have added your thoughts to the talk page, added your name as interested, or signed up as an affiliate organization. (And I hope many more of you will!)
I'm excited to announce that we now have a confirmed advisory group! This group is made up of around six cultural professionals (with libraries, archives, and museums all represented), and around six Wikipedians who will help lead in establishing the core goals of the Consortium and our best path forward. The full list can be found on the Consortium page [2]. Thank you to the GLAM professionals, GLAM-Wikimedians, and current/former WMF board members who have offered their time to help steer the Consortium!
We have also begun a list of principles [3], which serve as a foundation for the focus of the GLAM Consortium. Please do share your thoughts on these as we continue to fine tune them.
One of the main questions left to be answered is the appropriate structure that the Consortium should take.
Specifically, What platforms for discussion and information dispersal are most immediately useful & relevant?
The most important goal is to have a system for both sharing information & discussing emerging ideas that is useful for BOTH GLAM professionals and Wikipedians. Sara Snyder pointed out the usefulness of a blog (thanks Sara!) and I agree that a blog can be a great method for broadcast. In fact, thanks to Mike Peel and Dominic, we now have a Wordpress blog space ready to be fixed up! (... still working on that, but hopefully I'll have news soon : ).
That said, I also feel that we need a formal structure for non-Wikipedians and Wikipedians to be able to comfortably discuss GLAM-related topics. This is something of a new challenge. I personally feel that we should think through some new ground rules. In order to be less intimidating (or even just less time consuming) for non-Wikipedians, we should consider always replying on-list (or in the email thread) in order that everyone will see it. The usual situation is that we haphazardly discuss things in an email until someone pipes up and says "this should be on-wiki; let's move this to the talk page!" And that's fine too, but we should be cognizant that in this new mix of people, moving things completely to a talk page will lose important eyeballs. Likely things should just be replicated on-wiki.
Happy to hear everyone's thoughts on this and all manner of everything else Consortium-related.
Best,
Lori