Report on Meeting between Wikimedia and Artists in Mumbai on 14 February 2011

Bishaka had arranged the meeting through Ashok of Padma. It was held at Volte, an Art Gallery located at Colaba owned by Tushar Jivrajka. Liam and myself attended the same with Bishaka. The agenda was to promote GLAM among private art galleries while Liam was in Mumbai. It was also attended by Ashriya Lokhandwala of Lakeeren Art Gallery, Shrein Gandhi (another art gallery owner), a Belgian artist, Susan, a representative of ICI (Independent Curators International), of Jaico Publishing, and a representative of Prince of Wales Museum (Research Library), Mumbai. A representative of the Art Guild was also supposed to be present - however there was some misunderstanding on the time, however Bishaka exchanged contacts and shall be in touch with her. The major points discussed:

1. Liam gave an overview of what Wikipedia is and how it runs, what kind of reliable sources are required etc. There were a lot of questions asked which were answered by the three of us. Liam then went on to mention GLAM and reason for his visit (along with sharing his experience at the British Museum).  He gave examples of donations of pictures from libraries world over.

2. Bishaka brought up the point that there is little information of Indian art available on Wikipedia and no article on contemporary Indian art. She pointed out that it is in favour of the fraternity to have good information on Wikipedia as Wikipedia is the first point of call for information for a huge number of internet users and is among the first few listings on most Google search results.

3. Ashok gave an overview on his Padma project, how it works for the art fraternity and how he overcame obstacles such as peoples inhibitions of open licensing taking away business. Bishaka gave an example of how her own documentary film being available for free in low resolution with Padma has had no bearing on the sales of the film on Amazon and other websites. Liam pointed out how filmmakers earlier brought up breach of copyright to remove their film promos from Youtube until they realised it was advertisement for them and to their benefit to have their trailers on Youtube. Susan gave an overview of what ICI does and how it too promotes creative commons license.

4. There was a question of licensing. Liam explained the various Creative Commons Licensing options and which ones are accepted by Wikipedia. An important point here to note is Creative Commons with Share Alike Attribution means that the user has to release any derivative work under the same license and attribute it to the original artist. For example, a commercial organisation such as National Geographic would not use work under this license as it would want its own work copyright. Liam underlined that since Wikipedia promotes open licensing it does not even accept non-commerical licensing (Creative Commons Non-Commercial). Its got to be Creative Commons or Creative Commons with Share Alike Attribution or Public Domain. There was a grey area in this matter and there was a consensus to arrange a future meeting just for licensing norms to be understood. This would give a clear idea to the art galleries and how they could work with us. Tushar asked if there has been a successful partnership between private galleries and Wikipedia anywhere else in the world. Liam replied in the negative, he was however confident of it working here. He gave example of the west, where there is a lot of independent sources to back information for use on Wikipedia, something thats missing in India.

Overall there the meeting was positive, there would be more work required to synthesize a partnership for mutual benefit and then even more work to make it "work"!


Hope this helps!

Regards,
User:AroundTheGlobe


Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:29:23 +0530
From: bishakhadatta@gmail.com
To: pradeep.mohandas@gmail.com
CC: wikimedia-in-mum@lists.wikimedia.org; wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-in-mum] [Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: Liam Wyatt's visit to Mumbai and GLAM meetup - a summary


Continuing this thread with a reportback of Monday 14 Feb's GLAM meetings with Liam in Mumbai.

1)Our first meeting was with the Heras Institute at St Xavier's College.
Founded in 1926 as the Indian Historical Research Institute by Fr. Henry Heras S. J., the Heras Institute promotes historical and cultural research in India, fosters study and research in Indian history and archaeology, Indian art and literature, Indian religions and Indian culture, trains scholars and professors in research methodologies and the re-construction of history, and provides guidance and facilities needed for such Historical Research and Investigation.
Given their research/culture orientation, they would be ideal to collaborate with - but they were somewhat sceptical of the benefits of collaborating with wikipedia (which they have warned their students against referring to). However, they were interested in receiving documentation of other GLAM work that Liam or others may have initiated - this is to be the next step. Also, any collaboration can only take place with the college principal's assent. Liam and I felt it would need lots of convincing for this to happen, so maybe we should start with more interested GLAM institutions in Mumbai (eg Prince of Wales Museum or CSMVS, which Pradeep has already reported on).
Wikimedian Vivek Cherian expressed his inability to join us at this meeting since he was ill.
2)Our second meeting yesterday was hosted at and by Volte, a contemporary art gallery - and comprised an informal discussion with curators, gallerists and art historians from the following contemporary art institutions: Independent Curators International, Gallery Chemould, Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation which is the contemporary art wing of The Museum (CSMVS), Lakeeren, CAMP and pad.ma
UserAroundThe Globe participated at this meeting.
We discussed the status of Indian contemporary art on wikipedia (poor), possibilities for improving collaboratively through partnerships as proposed with CSMVS for ancient art (high), and the barrier of self-promotion since most contemporary art in India is in the hands of private galleries. There was definite interest: one proposal is to do a daylong workshop to infuse some Indian content into the page "Contemporary art" on wikipedia - this would also minimize promotion of specific artists.
There was a long discussion on images - and how to populate pages on Indian contemporary artists on wikipedia with images. For example, the very wellknown modern artists (eg MF Husain) and contemporary artists (Subodh Gupta, Bharati Kher, Jitish Kallat, Reena Kallat) all have pages on wikipedia - but no images of the art they create. From a user's perspective, seeing this art is an important visual experience for which they must leave wikipedia.
Galleries were willing to contribute images to populate these pages - but the issue is licencing. They are not sure who owns the copyright to the photo of the artist's work: the gallery? the artist? The Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation is actively considering putting 800 works on an online platform and is leaning towards a creative commons 'non-commercial' licence - they are open to discussing the need for CC-BY-SA if they contribute this to wikimedia commons.
Outcome of this was also an interest by both the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation and Volte, the host gallery, in convening a workshop on copyright - for wikimedians, artists, art foundations etc - since there are many confusions around image copyright, specially when we come down from the abstract principle to the concrete case.
In conclusion, all of us would like to thank Liam Wyatt for his visit to Mumbai - which was stimulating, productive, and fun...and which has opened many new doors. Since Ashwin from Pune and Anirudh from Ahmedabad also participated in the Mumbai meetup, the benefits of his visit have spread wider - Kolkata also got a small taste of GLAM with a hurried 15-minute skype presentation by Liam to the meetup at IIFT on Sat 12 Feb.
Cheers
Bishakha



















On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Pradeep Mohandas <pradeep.mohandas@gmail.com> wrote:
hi,

Thanks Arun for posting it here. I was really tired when I posted this yesterday to the Mumbai mailing list. It does seem more or less accurate. A few additions from what I missed out yesterday night.

1. With The Museum ( Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay - CSMVS), we spoke with the Museum Director, Chief Art Conservator and the Business Development Executive there. After the requisite background that Liam provided (it also helped perhaps that the British Museum Director, Neil MacGregor visited the Museum this week) that we gave them a rough idea of possible activities we could do together. We also explained to the Conservator how a typical session would be conducted to help them understand their part of the responsibilities and what will be ours. 
2. At Jnanapravaha, Bishaka and Liam visited. After the usual pitch, the feedback was that they were interested in getting students to write and improve articles on Indian art and aesthetics on Wikipedia. They have asked for help previous to the next semester in July on how such a thing can be organised. 
3. Ashwin Baindur asked about how to work with institutions like Maharashtra Archives which are facing a brunt of the budget cuts (they get the money after the song and dance shows, museums etc all get their cut) and have trouble with up-keep of their archives. Liam replied that this would mainly be in helping them digitise records. The trouble, Liam said, was on where to begin and how to priorotise work. Stating the example of the National Library, Kolkata he said that some books were not even docketed (I forget the original word - something to do with giving the books numbers and classifying appropriately). We agreed that Libraries and Archives also suffered because there was no good Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for Indic languages. Liam suggested a French example of how an old French cursive text made it un-OCR-able (new word - mine!) and got help from Wikipedians to manually type in text onto WikiSource. 
4. Bishaka raised the point that all of the GLAM activities could also be simultaneously done in various languages locally. So, during a Backstage Pass event in Mumbai, we could improve the English, Hindi and Marathi (say) articles at once. Editors in any language are welcome to contribute. 
5. There have been an influx of new people and requests from people for a basic editing session. Perhaps it is time to interlace the meetups with WikiAcademy. 

With that, I hope I've more or less covered all Wikipedia territory from the meetup. If I missed out on anything, feel very free to jump in and add your notes.

warm regards,
Pradeep

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