as you may have read before, we will be organizing a brainstorm meeting in London on Feb 18th - the excellent opportunity to discuss the opportunities and directions of a UK edition for Wiki Loves Monuments in 2012!

So what will we do? Well, we will not try to solve all the problems of the world. I will be there, with my experiences from Wiki Loves Monuments in 2010 and 2011 from the Netherlands and European contests, and we will try to see if there is enough interest to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2012 in the UK, to identify the challanges and opportunities ahead and what still would have to be done. I will not be organizing this myself, so input, initiative and interest (and lots of help) will definitely be needed from volunteers to make it a success.

So, why would one want to organize a 'Wiki Loves Monuments' in the first place? Well, the idea is that it is a photo contest open for the general audience. Besides hopefully many good quality (but don't expect supreme super de luxe) photo material of the UK heritage, it is also a potential way of getting in touch with two highly motivated groups of volunteers: First of all photographers (which can learn this way all about free licenses and uploading to commons) and secondly heritage enthusiasts (generally older people, who might in the long run also be interested in writing about their local heritage). By asking them to participate in a low threshold contest, they can learn that one can really add content to Wikipedia (by uploading their photos) in a relatively safe and easy way.

Also, it is a great opportunity to organize many local events around the topic - where there are interested volunteers to organize such. Potentially Wiki Loves Monuments can be used as a centerpiece to build other activities and cooperations around. This brainstorm might be a good time and place to analyze the opportunities there are, and see what it might bring in and what would be the best approach to get the most out of it!

But yeah, there will be many challanges to be overcome probably - things that seem like huge problems sometimes. The brainstorm can serve as a time and place to think about that as well, see what would be the best way to approach those issues. Most likely the UK is not the first country to bump into them (18 countries organized WLM in 2011), so lets sit down together, and identify what are the real problems, and what are mainly problems that are easily solved, or that you could easily live with.

Anyway, I would be thrilled to find the UK participating in Wiki Loves Monuments! Please add your input already to the page linked above, and join us in London on Feb 18! Looking forward to the meeting!