User:DamATnls/wikimania2014 report

Report of attendance at Wikimania 2014

The Barbican, London

8-10 August 2014

Wikimania is the annual international (un)conference and hackathon of the Wikimedia Foundation. It brings together WMF staff, folks that work on particular Wikimedia projects, national Wikimedia chapters (like Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Deutschland, Netherlands, France, South Africa etc etc), hackers/developers who build tools and bots, Wikipedia editors and GLAM folks like me (that is GLAM as in Galleries, Libraries, Museums and Archives not GLAM as in GLAMmed up for a night on the town).

Who I met
I met lots of interesting folks and in particular hung out with Miss_Wisdom from The British Library, Lars from National Library of Norway, user:llywelyn2000¬Robin Owain Wikimedia UK Wales Manager and Carli Spina from Harvard Law Library. I spoke with Daria from WMUK about the our Residency and of course I fleeting met Jimmy Wales.
 * Robin - he's coordinated programs to train 200 people. Secured funding for this. He's personally trained the First Minister of Wales. Govt of Wales sees value in enhancing Welsh wikipedia coz is most popular website in Welsh.


 * 1) Ally and I need to write up in a little more detail how we'd plan to do more outreach to help sustain the work Ally has done to date once the Residency.  We need to do this early Sept. See meeting below which might help our thinking on this

The GLAM track
The was a track at the conference that specifically focussed on GLAM initiatives etc. Useful stuff gleaned from the track included

GLAM metrics/evaluation tools
A whole bunch are here https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Resources/Tools. Interesting ones are
 * BaGLAMa - counts wikipedias and articles in those wikipedias that contain images from GLAM orgs. Includes NLS
 * extURL - counts how many articles have a particular domain name embedded in them. Can be used to track Wikipedia referencing NLS resources. Was developed by hayify at Koninklijke Bibliotheek
 * TreeViews - gives you all the articles within the same category

Outcomes / stuff to do

 * plan a meeting to bring me, Fred, Andrew and Ally together with colleagues from NLW and BL and to also to include Robin from WMUK to exchange knowledge and experience in the following areas:
 * sustainability in the community after WinR is gone
 * outreach to different language groups. Robin has much experience with Welsh outreach
 * outreach to under represented groups (youth, Western and Northern isles)
 * each libraries experience of open content policy development and open content publishing
 * possible equidistant location to be used to meet. Suggested new Birmingham public library
 * try out some of those tools
 * distribute WMUK annual review, WinR programme review
 * write this report