Dear Erik,
(Also copying in the Cultural Partners and GLAMwiki Toolset mailing lists
as Erik's email below is directly is related to them).
Thank you for this email with the explicit invitation for groups in the
Wikimedia movement to directly take responsibility for supporting the
technology needs of GLAM partnerships. Different groups in the movement
have different capacities and different areas of priority - and that is how
it should be :-) We each need to try and 'bite off what we can chew' in a
way that is coordinated, mutually beneficial, and not a duplication of each
others' efforts.
To that end...
Over the last couple of years *Europeana*[1] has been increasingly involved
in supporting tech development for mediawiki that is specifically targeted
at addressing the needs of the GLAMwiki community. I note that the report
you linked to on the stats that GLAMs want[1] and also the GLAMwiki Toolset
for mass multimedia upload which you also mentioned[2] are both
*Europeana* projects
- in collaboration with several European Wikimedia Chapters.
On behalf of *Europeana *I would like to confirm that we wish to become
even more involved in this area and has the full intention of supporting
further development in partnership with interested Chapters when possible.
In the fullness of time, we intend to apply for a WMF grant in order to
enable precisely that.
On the
mediawiki.org discussion page for the 2014/15 Engineering goals
there has been a fair bit of discussion about GLAM-related projects that
are not in the WMF's own plans[4]. Fabrice, as "process owner" for the
Multimedia section of those goals, has proposed on that talkpage a couple
of meetings of interested parties to discuss how we can all work together
effectively on this, notably in person at Wikimania, an offer which we
definitely accept :-) I also agree with Illario's point that formalising WMF
support for externally-developed software is an important criteria in any
grant decisions and for organisational reputation. Fortunately Fabrice has
specifically addressed this issue relating specifically to the GLAMwiki
Toolset which is very helpful.[5]
Sincerely,
Liam / Wittylama
GLAMWIKI coordinator, Europeana.
[1]
http://pro.europeana.eu/
[2]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.
pdf
[3]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GLAMwiki_Toolset_Project
[4]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia
_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Image_view_analytics
[5]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#
GLAMwiki_Toolset
wittylama.com
Peace, love & metadata
On 26 June 2014 05:54, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi folks,
At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who
were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved
in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on
Wikidata.
My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related
tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools
currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and
wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other
requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially
helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated
tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset.
There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all
media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and
APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be
done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3
FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are
separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements
are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help.
In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or
chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with
appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is
clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to
more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector.
At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with
the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given
all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has
to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the
uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore
I think having a "cultural tooling" team or teams in the larger
movement would be appropriate.
I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think
it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's
heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with
it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the
more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our
agenda anytime soon.
Thanks,
Erik
[1]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_…
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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