Forwarded below details of another exciting event, this time taking place in Canberra, Australia. I don't suppose anyone from the UK is going?

It would be great to find out how this goes so we can pick up some tips for the "London/Britain Loves Wikipedia" event penciled in for next spring.

Andrew

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Liam Wyatt" <liamwyatt@gmail.com>
To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed subscription)" <internal-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: chapters@wikimedia.ch
Sent: Tuesday, 26 May, 2009 15:42:21 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal
Subject: Re: [Chapters] [Internal-l] Announcing Wiki loves art Netherlands

Congratulations Hay and the rest of the Dutch team on your innovating work! From where I sit it looks like the Dutch are doing a lot of interesting things right now - including "Wikiwijs" - I'm jealous of your progress!

However let me take this opportunity, in the spirit of healthy rivalry between Chapters, to announce an even that Wikimedia Australia will be hosting in August:

Ladies and Gentlemen may I present to you the first ever "GLAM-WIKI" event. </fireworks>
G.L.A.M. (in English) stands for galleries, libraries, archives, museums and this will be the first time that the cultural sector of any country will come together to meet with WIkimedians to discuss how we can better work together. Whilst this is specifically looking at the Australian/NewZealand perspective I do believe that the discussions we have will be applicable to our two communities worldwide.

You can find out more and download the poster here: glam.wikimedia.org.au
We will be posting all event videos/slides/outcomes there afterwards.

The idea is that both the "GLAM sector" and the Wikimedia community instinctively know that they could offer a lot of expertise to the other. So, rather than being a conference where one community tells the other what it is doing wrong, GLAM-WIKI is designed to be a two-way discussion where we share best-practices and each community asks "how can we work better with you?" This is collaborative relationship building.

And the best bit is... everyone we talk to is very excited about it. Every national and State gallery, library, archive and museum we talk to says "wow - yes, we'll come to that! We need to know about that!" They've been told for the last decade that they need to "be online" but no one has come and said "Hi - we are from the internet and want to work with you and this is how we recommend you do it". Equally we as a community have never formally sat down with the organisations that are the professional cultural organisations and ask them what their experiences, best-practices and expectations are.

Thanks to the generous support of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Australian War Memorial  we will be able to run this event with no attendance fee and in state-of-the-art facilities. WMF-CPO Jennifer Riggs will be coming out to grace us with her presence and the Australian Government representative who is most engaged in issues about Open Access, online rights, etc. (senator Kate Lundy) will be opening. I'm very excited about the range of "big names" who've said to us that they're supportive of this and have agreed to speak and use their considerable influence in their field to promote this.

As part of the goals for each community to be able to take away with them an understanding of what they other community wants - and to see if those changes can be implemented - we would very much like to have some international representation from non-Australian Wikimedia communities. So today Brianna Laugher and I drove around the "embassy quarter" in our capital knocking on doors to see who would be interested in sponsoring people from their country to fly out here. Not surprisingly none said "of course - here's a bag of money" but many were very interested (especially the Swedish and Dutch actually...). If you would like to attend this event - please contact us and maybe we can organise a combined approach to your embassy or national culture ministry.

If there are any questions or suggestions please contact me and we hope that some of you might be able to join us in person in Canberra in August. Otherwise, join us on Twitter during the event.

Peace, Love and Metadata!

-Liam Wyatt
[[witty lama]] VP Wikimedia Australia

wittylama.com/blog
Sent from Canberra, Act, Australia



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