Hey All,

The New Media Consoritium just put out their technologies and Museums report. Its definitely worth a read, I hope you get a chance: http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2016-mus

A handful of highlights stand out to me in the GLAM-Wiki context:

One of their "important policy" changes, is the growing importance of Networks, Consortia, and Alliances to help museums solve technological problems beyond individual organization capacity. This seems to have a lot of oppportunity for our work: Alex Hinojo has been leading a lot of success Catalonia, with the Catalan Public Library network: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Case_studies/Catalonia%27s_Network_of_Public_Libraries is the close thing to a consortia . Similarly, the York Museum Trust w/ Pat Hadley, had a lot of scaling impact. Similarly. I have seen reports from both WMDE and WMSV that suggest focusing on networks to create impact. Instead of having a single organization buy in to our outreach, it might be worth focusing more time and energy on strategically focused networks whose main goal is expanding the capacity of oragnizations within the networks.
Digital humanities -- one of the emerging technologies they focus on is the analysis and interactive projects being developed by the cluster of research called "digitial humanities". These projects are pushing a lot of cultural heritage sharing with the public onto the internet in interactive ways, with considerable integration with works being done by students. This appears like an opportunity for us to think more about how we hybrize the Wikimedia Education program and GLAM-Wiki with a focus on the humanities -- unlike the sciences where STEM outreach and the current version of the Education Program have been very successful, there hasn't been much success in expert engagement from the humanities in project like Wikidata and Wikipedias. Also, this seems to be important for the diversity gaps that Art+Feminism and other projects largely located in GLAMs would be well suited to work on.
Social media -- throughout the report, there is increased interest in social media and external engagement with patrons/audiences. Making sure that we maintain a social media presence, spreading the word of GLAM-Wiki as part of OpenGLAM (rather than just a predecessor), seems to be a way to join the conversation and improve the impact of our work. Distributed projects like #colorourcollection seem to have a similar level of enthusiasm as our #1lib1ref campaign -- we ought to examine how our engagement with other cultural heritage can also be part of these changing opportunities.
Interactive and VR media - VR seems like a major gap in our current infrastructure -- we don't even have much in the way of immersive panaromic support, much less the range of other media types. Spending energy finding partners in this space might help us be a destination for GLAMs to store workproduct in this psace (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133526 )
Visualization + Open Data -- increasingly data analysts and data visualizations are being used within Museums and on their website with the growing power of Wikidata, its going to be worth having our visualization tools in your backpocket -- (check out Zika research from WikiCite : https://twitter.com/wikicite16/status/735845122903027712 or John's recent work on the Bioreserve material http://www.wikilovesearth.bio/ ) . I am also beginning conversations with the Maps and Graphs team at WMF about the GLAM-Wiki use cases for their tools, especially if they could be embedded externally like Commons media.

These are all my initial thoughts -- please poke holes in them, ask questions, or propose any thoughts/challenges you might notice.

I am going to be hosting a session at Wikimania about the future of GLAM-Wiki, where we can think through what some of the opportunities are in this space -- please bring ideas, think about what ways you want to see GLAM-Wiki grow and change: https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Discussions/Glam

Cheers,

Alex Stinson

GLAM-Wiki Strategist

Wikimedia Foundation

Twitter:@glamwiki/@sadads

Learn more about how the communities behind Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects partner with cultural heritage organizations: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM