Wikimediauk-l June 2012

wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org

44 participants
67 discussions

Request: GLAM speaker at LGBTI ALMS // The Future of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Histories
by Fae 23 Jun '12

23 Jun '12

The international gay and lesbian archives, museum, and library conference (LGBTI ALMS 2012) will be taking place 1-3 August in Amsterdam. The organizer has been looking to invite a speaker for the conference from our community. She's interested in Wikipedia, but also issues of crowdsourcing and open content more generally. The official deadline is passed, but if anyone feels they could provide an good quality talk relating to our GLAM programme, of interest to this audience, and potentially represent Wikimedia UK at the same time, sent me an email and I can pass on your contact details. * Link: http://www.ihlia.nl/english/english/english_home/LGBT%20ALMS%202012%20Confe… Cheers, Fae

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GLAM-WIKI 2012 - registration now open!
by Andrew Gray 22 Jun '12

22 Jun '12

Dear all, I am pleased to announce that registration is now open for the GLAM-WIKI 2012 conference, to be held at the British Library in London on 14th - 16th September 2012. The conference will feature two days of presentations and workshops, with the Friday focused on the work Wikimedia and similar organisations have done in partnership with cultural institutions, presenting case studies and discussing the benefits to both parties. The Saturday will be oriented more towards the practical and technical side, looking at ways to work together and running workshops to share best practice. The third day, Sunday 16th, will be an unconference day, with the focus and agenda determined by the attendees on the day. We are currently taking proposals for talks, workshops and panel sessions, on three broad themes: * Open content in the GLAM sector * Developing sustainable partnerships * New models and future projects The call for papers will close on 23rd July, and the schedule will be announced on 30th July. Registration is now open at: http://glamwiki2012.eventbrite.co.uk/ and accomodation details will be released at a later date when hotel arrangements are confirmed. More details, and the call for papers, are at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_2012 If you have any questions, please contact glam(a)wikimedia.org.uk -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

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Wikimedia UK Business Cards
by Richard Symonds 21 Jun '12

21 Jun '12

All, I'm currently organising business cards for interested (and active!) volunteers. If you're interested, please let me know *privately (off-list) *within the next day or two. I need to get these cards sorted out ASAP - if you're interested I'll need your username, your phone number (if you want it on there), an email address (if you want one on there) and anything else you think relevant. It'd also be nice to know what you'd consider yourself as (eg "GLAM Volunteer"). I might need to tweak these titles a little, but not too much. I'll also need a brief explanation of why it's important for you to have them - nothing big, just a sentence or two, something like "I do a lot of GLAM Outreach with museums in the York area, and would like the cards to appear more professional when doing projects" or "I speak fluent Cornish and would like to be able to approach Cornish organisations in a semi-official basis". The cards will comply with WMF Visual Identity guidelines, will be professional-looking, will be funded by WMUK. We'll keep track of who has them in the office - which means you'll need to be a chapter member, or at the very least well-known to the chapter. They won't confer any "official status" on you, and you won't be able to sign agreements or similar on behalf of the chapter (obviously), but they will help you make those first vital inroads when talking to people from GLAMs. I can think of 5 or 6 volunteers off the top of my head who could make good use of them. Let me know ASAP. *I can't promise that we'll give them out *to *everyone*, as I need board approval, *and *there needs to be a good business case for it, but I think the majority of the board and staff believe that active chapter members should be able to get support like this without too much hassle. All the best, Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 Disclaimer viewable at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Email_disclaimer Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk

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May be of interest
by Jon Davies 21 Jun '12

21 Jun '12

Saw reference to this in the WMDE annual report. Nice/schön Anyone know about it? First Meeting The first official Wikipedia: London meeting took place on 6 August 2011 by 20 clock in the Old Ale Emporium (405 Green Lanes, London, N4 1EU; information) instead. Have participated Gustavf, Stefan and Waithamai. The three were in agreement that it was a successful meeting and could possibly be the prelude to another round tables in the British capital. -- *Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK*. Mobile (0044) 7803 505 169 tweet @jonatreesdavies Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513 Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Telephone (0044) 207 065 0990. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk

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Re: [Wikimediauk-l] New Volunteer Contributor
by fabian＠unpopular.org.uk 21 Jun '12

21 Jun '12

Hi Martin, WMUK is currently developing a variety of resources to provide both a Virtual Learning Environment and face-to-face training sessions. However both of these are still in their infancy at the moment. It would be helpful to know whether you already have some experience editing Mediawikis (the technology behind wikipedia), whether on Wikipedia or elsewhere. It would also be good to know whether you have created a user account. This is the first step. Perhaps you could contact me on my talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Leutha WMUK is also looking at some activities for Black History Month. Please see: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Black_History_Month,_2012 Please add your name to the page if you feel you might like to be involved in this initiative. all the best Fabian (User:leutha) >Hi >I wish to develop page articles-Wikipedia: >.Genocide Justice-Rwanda. > -Gacaca Court Justice > -National Courts system on Genocide > -International Justice on Genocide > >Request: -induction training on WMUK processing > system > -Peer Reviewer on research&planning > strategy >Thanks > >-- >Martin Mujyanama >LLB,LLM >co Donegal Town >Ireland

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New Volunteer Contributor
by Martin Mujyanama 21 Jun '12

21 Jun '12

Hi I wish to develop page articles-Wikipedia: .Genocide Justice-Rwanda. -Gacaca Court Justice -National Courts system on Genocide -International Justice on Genocide Request: -induction training on WMUK processing system -Peer Reviewer on research&planning strategy Thanks -- Martin Mujyanama LLB,LLM co Donegal Town Ireland

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Train the Trainers workshops
by Martin Poulter 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

Hi all, I realise that I hadn’t set out expectations for last week’s training workshop, and what we’re doing with the Train the Trainers programme. So, with my apologies for that, here is quite a long essay about how I personally see it, which I’m sharing with the community as a whole. I've put it at <http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter/Training_on_one_leg> in case you'd prefer to read it on-wiki. We’re already delivering training in various contexts. A lot of it is professional quality, because Wikimedia UK is very lucky in the amount of expertise and experience we have available. However, our luck won’t always hold, and we need to be serious and systematic. In the long term we want our training programme to be flexible, sustainable, professional quality, credible, and owned by the community. It will be trapezoid shape: an “upper” layer training and accrediting another layer of trainers, cascading skills and knowledge through a system that ultimately reaches a large volume of training recipients. Since WMUK has diverse training needs and we each have different, complementary skills, our training will be diverse, avoiding any kind of “one size fits all”. People will be able to specialise in GLAM outreach, education outreach, events for other experienced Wikimedians, or whatever they’re best at. They’ll also be encouraged to develop individual approaches to training based on their own strengths. This all means we are going to have to train and accredit people who train and accredit people who train and accredit... indefinitely. I’ll call this the Hard Problem. The training workshops last week and forthcoming in October are our first stab at tackling the Hard Problem. We were invited to take part *both* as participants in the training and as observers of the process. As a participant, I found myself often thinking “I already knew that” or “I wouldn’t want to do that in my training”, but I picked up some useful tips and suggestions. It was as an observer that I really learnt an enormous amount. We spent a lot of time on social skills: Candy acted in a role as a terrible presenter, and we had to give feedback. There was feedback on the feedback, and we discussed the process of giving feedback on the feedback -very meta! People were generally very good at this task, but we had to address it. If you do a lot of training for WMUK, you will face that situation for real at some point. Someone very like Candy’s character will come to you. They’ll be wildly enthusiastic about getting their town or their local society involved with Wikimedia, but they won’t yet have developed crucial skills. You’ll have to handle that in a way that avoids wasting that person’s enthusiasm. Wikimedia UK won’t come in and sort this out: as the trusted volunteer, you will *be* Wikimedia UK in that situation. You might even see this problem at a meta level, if a colleague gives an enthusiastic volunteer really unhelpful feedback which discourages them. You’ll need to give feedback on the feedback. We discussed conveying professionalism and authority, and how this has to be interpreted differently when talking to t-shirted sysadmins or sharply-suited legal professionals. One participant thought this part of the training wasn’t relevant to them. At the time, that set off an alarm bell in my mind, but it seems that over the course of the weekend this person did come to see this as something they needed to think about and see that it only meant a small change to what they were doing. There was an assessment and accreditation aspect to the weekend. Even when you already have skilled trainers, this is important. Some people are excellent at training but don’t know they are, and we saw this among our group. As a community of trainers, we need to build confidence in each other, and also to see that people approach training in distinctive ways. That was a very valuable aspect of what happened in the workshop. We talked about coping when things go wrong. If you do lots of training for WMUK, at some point you’ll be in a room with librarians or archivists who have the misconception that you’re there to undermine their jobs. Or the event organiser will have given you the wrong impression about the audience and what they are expecting. You’ll find yourself having meticulously prepared a session but ditching it and going back to first principles. To boil it down, I’d say that to help with the Hard Problem, we’re above all looking for trainers who can train people to draw cartoon sheep on a whiteboard. Some people will have a very negative reaction to that last paragraph. They’ll tell us that Wikipedia doesn’t require people to draw cartoon sheep, that WMUK has no identified training need for cartoon sheep skills, and that the very idea is a nonsensical distraction from our mission. That’s the reaction I used to have. In a way, that reaction is an acid test. If you do a lot of training for WMUK, at some point you’ll be in a room with people who have been sitting at their computers all day, are getting restless, and are just not seeing the point you’re trying to make about good faith collaboration. You’ll need some activity that gets them on their feet, is fun and memorable, and non-intimidating. Cartoon sheep, or something similar, are ideal. People don’t need any specialist jargon or cultural background to understand the task. It’s a good task for showing people that: * they can get better at *anything* through practice * even in a highly constrained task, people can show a distinctive personality, even eccentricity * doing a good job involves being prepared to erase your previous work and start again * relentlessly negative and relentlessly positive feedback.are both undesirable for different reasons If you wanted to teach people about being a Wikipedia admin, one way to start would be to get them to draw their best cartoon sheep. Then without warning you could summarily erase all the sheep. That would kick off a discussion of how people feel about having their work deleted, and how we should prepare them for it. I hope we don’t have WMUK trainers who think that being a WP admin is something you do “on the computer” and therefore all the training has to take place at the computer. I could go on and on about how cartoon sheep are useful in WMUK training, and I’d still miss all the benefits that better trainers can see. With some imagination you could say the same about card games, improvised comedy sketches, or circus skills: at work, I once attended an enjoyable hour-long training session on how to stand on one leg. I work at a university, not a circus, but hopefully by now I don’t need to explain why that was a good session. So as I said, people’s reaction to the sheep suggestion is an acid test. If you think it’s nonsense, you may well be excellent at showing people how to use Wikipedia, but I’m interested in the Hard Problem, and for that WMUK needs people who take the expansive view of training. Yes, there are decisions to be made about which Wikipedia policies newcomers should learn about in their first session, what to put in the handouts in a session for university managers, or what the training needs of our partner organisations are. These need attention, but they’re the easy problems. We’ve solved them already or we have the collective expertise to. If you’re an experienced Wikimedian and trainer and you think you need dedicated training for these issues, you probably have too low a view of your own expertise. If you were at the workshop last week, please write up the activities you’ve devised in the relevant section of the WMUK site: see http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/For_trainers . My ideas for activities to do with school teachers are written up at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_for_schools_workshop . I’ve used wrong terminology in places, and I’m terrible at estimating how long an activity will last, but I’m hoping those improvements will come through the wiki process. Think about what events you could run with partner organisations, with other Wikimedians, or other audiences. We all have different interests and if we work as a community to design and deliver new events, we could rapidly build up an impressive training programme for Wikimedia UK. The feedback we’ll get from the trainers, individually and as Wikimedia UK, will help us find the roles we’re suited for in the overall picture, and so help us towards that long-term goal I talked about. I hope everyone training for WMUK will keep a reflective log: to write down, for each training experience, a few bullet points about what went well and about what you could do differently or better next time. This is private to you, for personal reflection, but you should be prepared to discuss it with a mentor as part of future accreditation, or show it to someone you’re mentoring as an example of reflective practice. If you were not at the workshop, but you’re interested in being involved in WMUK’s training programme, I urge you to sign up for the weekend in October. Whether you’re already an outstanding trainer, just beginning, or somewhere imbetween, it will give you opportunities to learn a great deal, and above all WMUK will benefit from your input. There will be an accreditation process with a chance to get individual feedback and a certificate: professional quality work should not just be done, but be seen to be done. ...and I don't want to give this secret away too widely, but it was a really enjoyable weekend spent with people whose company I enjoy. -- Dr Martin L Poulter Volunteer, Wikimedia UK http://uk.wikimedia.org/ Wikipedia contributor http://enwp.org/User:MartinPoulter Musician http://myspace.com/comapilot Person http://infobomb.org/

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Fwd: Your MEP can help stop ACTA this week!
by Jon Davies 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

SOme of you may be moved to email in support of ORG. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jim Killock <jim.killock(a)action.openrightsgroup.org> Date: Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:33 PM Subject: Your MEP can help stop ACTA this week! To: jon.davies(a)wikimedia.org.uk [image: Logo] <http://www.openrightsgroup.org/> Dear Dear Jon Davies, Great news! Your MEP is involved in the key vote in the European Parliament tomorrow 21 June about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This will affect whether the European Parliament ultimately reject ACTA or not. It is important that your MEP understands people's concerns. Calling your MEP will help make this happen. *London MEP: Syed Kamall Note: *Tell Syed Kamall if you believe the plenary vote should not be delayed. Neither the European Commission nor the European Court of Justice can provide meaningful guarantees about the implementation of ACTA and a delay will simply deny citizens and their representatives the chance they have now to make a meaningful decision about this treaty. You could ask him to withdraw his amendment if you agree with us. * Contact: Tel.: +322 28 45792 E-mail: syed.kamall(a)europarl.europa.eu * *What's happening tomorrow?* This is a really big vote. Once again it will really help if you contacted your MEP. Once again, it really will make a difference. The INTA committee is basically in charge of the 'dossier' - meaning they're leading on examining ACTA and recommending to the whole European Parliament whether it should give its consetn to or reject ACTA. They are supposed to take into account the other committee's opinions - which as you may remember, all voted to recommend ACTA is rejected. Those decisions were influenced hugely by the many people across Europe who got in touch with their MEPs to tell them why they think the European Parliament should reject the treaty. It's now to time to get back behind the wheel and get in touch with the members of the INTA committee to make sure they understand the problems, and why you care about it. We would like MEPs in the committee to vote in favour of the opinion of the lead rapporteur David Martin MEP - that is to say,* to recommend ACTA is rejected*. And we believe that *the plenary vote should happen as scheduled*(this is the vote by the whole of the European Parliament on the ultimate decision, which is due to happen in early July). That means that *we think the amendment recommending a delay to the plenary vote should be rejected*. This amendment was proposed by MEP Syed Kamall, who represents London. More information is available on our blog<http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2012/help-us-win-another-crucial-acta-v…> . Thank you for your help in beating ACTA. Jim Killock Executive Director If you wish to opt out of future emails, you can do so here<http://action.openrightsgroup.org/ea-campaign/clientcampaign.do?ea.client.i…> . If you like what we do, then why not join us<http://www.openrightsgroup.org/join> ? -- *Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK*. Mobile (0044) 7803 505 169 tweet @jonatreesdavies Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513 Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Telephone (0044) 207 065 0990. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk

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GLAM WIKI conference organisation meeting 22 June 2-5pm London
by Daria Cybulska 19 Jun '12

19 Jun '12

Dear All, Wikimedia UK is having the GLAM WIKI 2012<http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_2012>organisation meeting on Friday *22 June from 2-5pm*. Please do let me know if you can attend in person (Wikimedia UK office), or remotely. We will be discussing the timeline of jobs that are available to be done, and our progress so far. I hope to see all of you interested there. Best wishes, Daria -- Daria Cybulska - Events Organiser, Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 207 065 0994 +44 7803 505 170 -- Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).

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Oxford Internet Institute blog post about WMUK award
by Tom Morris 19 Jun '12

19 Jun '12

Just passing this on... http://www.zerogeography.net/2012/06/we-won-educational-institution-of-year… -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/>

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Wikimediauk-l June 2012