[Wikimediaindia-l] The GLAM challenge Part 3
Part 3 - Witty Lama's response! Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur -- -- Forwarded message -- From: Liam Wyatt Date: 2011/1/31 Subject: Re: The challenge : Was Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Liam Wyatt's visit to India To: Ashwin Baindur Cc: shirish शिरीष , Bishakha Datta , "Jogalekar, Sudhanwa" Dear all, Thank you for adding me to this thread. I will reply to various people's comments all in this email as best as I can. Ashwin wrote: It would help if WikiMedia Foundation made some guidelines and documentation on these materials. This is, in part, one of the purposes of my fellowship. You can see the first attempts of mine to lay out an idea for how this should happen here: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Documentation_%26_Case_studies Ideally, by the end of the year we will have a set of "how to" documents for different kinds of things we want to do with GLAMs, with equivalent "case study" documents written by a GLAM themselves who has already done it, explaining why it worked and how. Ashwin wrote: In such a complex environment, what is our standing to engage the GLAM institution such as Kelkar Museum? Let WikiMedia Foundation (Witty Lama, Bishakha et al) work out the modalities for a GLAM project in India. Should the pointsmen (who should "own" the project) be an editor or a WMF rep? This is also a complex question but one that is not going to be solved in the next month, probably not the next year. This is the kind of long term issue that we as a worldwide movement are slowly working out. However I have a couple of things that I think are clear: it is important to note that outreach is not the Wikimedia Foundation's role, it is the community and especially the chapters who do this [obviously it's a bit different in the USA for the moment]. For the richer chapters [e.g. UK, Germany...] I am trying to get them to hire a person to be the "outreach coordinator" to professionally manage relationships, but for individual cities, poorer chapters, or areas where there is no chapter presence (therefore - most of the world) I am currently suggesting the model of the "Wikimedia GLAM ambassador": http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Ambassadors_%26_Interns This is by no means a solid idea but we're working on it :-) The most crucial part of working with a specific GLAM is that there is a local, competent and trusted person [trusted by both Wikimedia community and the GLAM] to be the contact person. There is no formal title required for this, but it can be arranged if it helps e.g. "ambassador". Also important is that that person doesn't feel like they personally "own" that museum otherwise the great advantage of our community - the many volunteers - gets stifled by the bottleneck of one person trying to promote their own power. shirish wrote: The point I wanted to make is because there is only digital american and European art that is the culture which is ingrained and known about, the rest of the world is just not known and games have been an influencer atleast to young and middling age group audiences world over. Yes - there is definitely a defect of cultural heritage available digitally from non western countries, for a variety of reasons. However, this sometimes goes the other direction (with the less developed country getting their content more available than the developed country - e.g. Argentina's Wikimedia Chapter has been given national TV footage from the [[Falklands war]] to put on the Spanish Wikipedia but the BBC in England has not given any footage for the English Wikipedia! I don't pretend to know all of the situation in India and it's cultural heritage organisations, but I can make an educated guess that one of the major problems in India is: 1) Vast amounts of objects/papers/materials that is uncatalogued and poorly stored (probably deteriorating) 2) Lack of digitisation money and equipment. This is not just a "developing world problem" - it is also the case in the Australian national archives too... But, this brings the problem of a lack of Indian cultural heritage online back to a much more fundamental level than poor SEO, it is about cataloguing, preserving and digitizing. Only then do we get to questions of "what metadata format" or "what copyright" etc. If this is true, perhaps then (and this is just an idea), one thing that Wikimedia India could be doing with State/National Archives and Libraries is funding the purchase and operation of digitisation equipment. For example: there could be a "Wikimedia digitisation officer" in the State Archives paid by WMF/WM-ID. In exchange for doing good quality digitsation for free, the Wikimedia community gets a copy of the scan. It could also be done as part of a "residency" at the GLAM where Wikipedians ask for specific documents/facts to be found and the resident does the research and makes the scan. It would be a good way of extracting "new" history from these inst
[Wikimediaindia-l] The GLAM challenge Part 2
Part 2 - Shirish's views. Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur -- -- Forwarded message -- From: shirish शिरीष Date: 2011/1/29 Subject: Re: The challenge : Was Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Liam Wyatt's visit to India To: Bishakha Datta Cc: Ashwin Baindur , "Jogalekar, Sudhanwa" , Liam Wyatt At bottom :- On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 02:16, Bishakha Datta wrote: > Dear Ashwin, > > Many thanks for this note - am ccing Liam Wyatt as suggested by you. > > Liam: on this thread are Ashwin, Shirish, Sudhanwa - wikimedians and free > software folks from Pune. Hi all, I do not know how much I can help in this project. A bit embarrassed as I have some strong opinions on this matter and a slightly different take on it. No artist, no software developer either, just a blogger and a FOSS user. From what little I know of museums they are a large repository of not just historical documents and artefacts but also cultural, whether they may be nice-looking artefacts such as motifs,symbols or/and artefacts which makes us imagine how our ancestors lived. Some of these cultural history is just lost. I am a foodie as well like cooking (not much skillful but ok enough to make sure that I do not go hungry) hence taking a cooking example. Just to take an stupid/simple example, look at 'Kadai' https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kadai for reference. I have seen implementations of Kadai over centuries in some of the museums so do not think it is something which got/happened yesterday but over centuries. I do know that the Thais have a similar kind of utensil (made of wood though) which they use for rice, noodles whatever. I forgot the name however. Do they share some kind of rich background, something I/We are not aware of, do not know ? Did the Buddhists went with the Kadai to Thailand and fashioned it with wood there (perhaps wood was more abundant than steel,iron etc. in those times) I have no idea. I am sure there are so many examples that my puny mind cannot comprehend just have to say that this is a project which is needed because sadly history is being wiped out here as elsewhere in the name of modernism. Another off-take would be because there is not so much content in the commons of such historical and cultural pieces, digital games and art pieces also have just American and European culture in it. > Best > Bishakha So will end this mail with hopefulness that Ashwin and Sudhanwa can take this project forward and atleast jump start the process. -- Regards, Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com 065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17 -- Forwarded message -- From: shirish शिरीष Date: 2011/1/29 Subject: Re: The challenge : Was Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Liam Wyatt's visit to India To: Bishakha Datta Cc: Ashwin Baindur , "Jogalekar, Sudhanwa" , Liam Wyatt Adding at bottom :- 2011/1/29 shirish शिरीष : > Another off-take would be because there is not so much content in the > commons of such historical and cultural pieces, digital games and art > pieces also have just American and European culture in it. The point I wanted to make is because there is only digital american and European art that is the culture which is ingrained and known about, the rest of the world is just not known and games have been an influencer atleast to young and middling age group audiences world over. -- Regards, Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com 065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17 ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
[Wikimediaindia-l] The GLAM challenge Part 1
Please ref to the previous post titled "The GLAM Challenge). Part 1 consisting of Posts (two) by Ashwin Baindur given below Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur -- -- Forwarded message -- From: Ashwin Baindur Date: Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 7:52 PM Subject: The challenge : Was Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Liam Wyatt's visit to India To: Bishakha Datta , "Jogalekar, Sudhanwa" Cc: "Agarwal, Shirish" Inline... > On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Ashwin Baindur > wrote: >> >>This is a very big challenge in so many dimensions, I kid you not. >> > Let's discuss this in more detail. > The way I understand it, the objective of GLAM Wiki is to bring a host of material in conventional repositories onto the free domain (I dont want to call it public domain). WikiMedia Foundation has made some progress in this issue as one occasionally sees : * Bits of news from the blogs or Signpost mentioning them. * The Commons page announces these deals prominently. They also included details & links to Commons Projects wherein these images are to be sorted/categorised/processed in some way by the editors. The TropenMuseum is a museum in Amsterdam about the Tropics. The museum has a large collection of objects and photographs about the Tropics. The museum will donate images about two former Dutch colonies, Suriname and Indonesia, to Commons. The first uploads are about Suriname and particularly the Maroon culture from Suriname and it is followed by material that has Indonesia as its subject. Indonesian Wikipedians have agreed to translate all the Dutch captions and metadata into Bahasa Indonesia so that the people of Indonesia could interact with the material. The State Library Of Queensland has donated 50,000 public domain images, with metadata, to Wikimedia Commons. The ages fall under 50,000 subject headings, which need to be mapped to Commons categories. Editors need to do this. A bot is uploading the images. Now, what is not known are the exact specifics of what such an engagement with a GLAM consists of and what are the responsibilities and expectations. It would help if WikiMedia Foundation made some guidelines and documentation on these materials. But using common sense, I'm sure it will go along these lines... * Liaison with the GLAM institution. Sell the idea to them. * Work out the crux point - the freedom issues, especially in light of copyright, local and international rights. * Examine all stakeholder issues and resolve them. * Work out the details of the activities, roles, responsibilities and partnership to concurrence of all. * Ideally create a CPM/PERT chart for monitoring. * Arranging funding for some of the activities. * Outreach with the community to get them to buy into helping out with the crowdsourced activities. * Legal vetting of the agreement. This has to be between WikiMedia Foundation and GLAM Institution not us editors. Only then... * Write up an agreement. * Begin operations, monitor, report, sort out issues, blah, blah. * Publicity and get good PR. In this case, we need to understand, who are the stakeholders - * GLAM Institution(s), * Wikimedia Foundation, * State Govt of India, * Central Govt of India, * Pointsman for GLAM activities on behalf of WMF (Witty Lama), * WMF's India office (Bishakha till its established), * Local Editors chapter of Pune ( us ) * Wikimedia India (Arun Ram) * press * society in general * Editors around the world (including India) * Funding agencies * contractors In such a complex environment, what is our standing to engage the GLAM institution such as Kelkar Museum? Let WikiMedia Foundation (Witty Lama, Bishakha et al) work out the modalities for a GLAM project in India. Should the pointsmen (who should "own" the project) be an editor or a WMF rep? Ideally, WMF needs to hire a full time guy to be on this and work out the specifics of a hundred issues who can mentor the Indian projects thorough the project in case some editor takes up the pointsmans role for a project. >> Bishakha, we need integration for an India English Wikipedia community >> because thats whom the Foundation will have to fall back on to support >> it. We cant be talking on lists parochially as is happening in in >> terms of Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore or in terms of Kn, Ml, Mr WPs for >> GLAM projects as GLAM projects provide knowledge and resources to the >> complete world & wiki community, definitely India's (my additions in tis >> email) >> independent of language of Wikipedia platform. As regards, the integration etc which needs to be discussed in more detail, I started off plannning to do that but wrote a wholly different email instead :-). These are my thoughts, for your consideration Bishakha, you may like to cc this to Witty Lama if you feel it is appropriate Ashwin Ashwin Baindur previously wrote : -- Forwarded message -- From: Ashwin Baindur Date: Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 12:53 PM Subject: Re: [
[Wikimediaindia-l] The GLAM challenge
Hi everybody, A short discussion offlist about GLAM is being put up for community's information and participation. It is being added in three posts - Part 1 - post by Ashwin Baindur about some thoughts on GLAM Projects, and Part 2 - post about Shirish Agarwal 's views Part 3 - reply by Witty Lama on these emails Warm regards, Ashwin Baindur -- ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
