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
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
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
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
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
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
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/
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
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).