Sorry for cross-posting.
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(a)hotmail.com
Skype: johnandersson86
[1] See
http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Projekt:Europeana_Awareness for more
information. Currently only available in Swedish.
[2] See
http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Projekt:Europeana_Awareness/Europeana_meets_Wo…
Hi John [and hello again to everybody from the WLM list],
It is nice to hear about new initiatives born from WLM. What exactly
do you understand by public art? Are we talking about art forms which
sit in the public space, like statues in a square, or about something
else?
Is your job description limited to GLAM events and countries with
chapters? We in Romania have neither, and the flow of information has
so far been mostly reversed (e.g. the WLM photos from Romania are
going to be uploaded to Europeana), but I would personally appreciate
suggestions about how to use more effectively the material that
Europeana already has (especially the meta-data, which IMO is a
heavily underused CC-0 database).
Thanks,
Strainu