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@hotmail.com
Skype: johnandersson86