Dear all, Apparently, there has been some reluctance on behalf of the WMCH Board to engage in the international photo contest "Wiki Loves Monuments"<http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/> in 2013, despite the fact that several people from within the community clearly manifested their interest in participating in the contest and its organization.
Like other members of the community, I am convinced that the contest is an excellent opportunity to reach out to new contributors, to generate high-quality pictures for the illustration of articles covering Swiss cultural heritage objects and that it provides us on top of that with a great opportunity to do PR with regard to a broader public and to reach out to cultural institutions and like-minded organizations. I have therefore talked to and e-mailed with several of the board members to understand the reasons for their reluctance and have proposed to make a feasibility analysis, to enroll "volunteers", and to bring the topic up at the General Assembly to see whether the WMCH members are backing the Swiss participation in the contest. As far as I understand, the reasons for the reluctance of the WMCH board members have been at least fourfold: - Some of them seem to doubt whether the international contest would actually take place this year, suggesting that the international WLM team has no clear plans and no budget for WLM 2013 yet. - There have been some fears that some federal institutions would not approve of WMCH using the official lists of cultural objects of regional significance (B-objects and possibly C-objects). Given the fact that the lists of A-objects are only lacking very few images, this would make the contest obsolete. - There have been some fears that the task of translating and updating the B- and C-lists poses too big a challenges in terms of volunteer workload, especially if we are expecting the lists of B-objects to undergo significant changes every year. - The board seems to expect a lack of volunteer engagement, while the paid staff members are not available to compensate for this. I will therefore focus my feasibility analysis on the following points: 1. We need to have clarity concerning the international WLM contest in 2013. 2. The federal institutions (Office de culture / Protection of cultural heritage) should not protest against us using the official B-lists. 3. We need to find an easier way to ingest the lists of cultural objects into Wikipedia and to update them in the future. 4. There needs to be a fit between tasks and available personnel resources. 5. The GA needs to approve the project and the budget. Concerning point 1, I have had extensive talks with Lodewijk Gelauff and Maarten Dammers, the initiators of the WLM contests, this week-end: There is no doubt that the international contest will take place and that they will support us with the organization of the national contest. In order to facilitate the coordination at the international level, the Swiss contest will be fully aligned with the international contest: the Swiss contest will take place in September and use the same infrastructure as the other countries. There will be a WLM coordination meeting in Milano next Thursday, which I will attend to join-up with the international team. Concerning point 2, I will contact the institutions holding the data of the lists of cultural objects in order to ask them to make the data available in a machine-readable format and to provide us with the missing internal identifiers (B and C lists). It has been related that representatives of federal institutions have objected against WMCH using the B-lists for the contest in the past. I therefore ask the people who have been confronted with such positions to transmit me the names and contact information of their interlocutors and the context in which the statements were made by the end of this week. I will then contact these people to see how I can alleviate their concerns. If the GA votes in favor of WLM 2013, I will of course ask the federal institutions to become official partners of the contest. Concerning point 3, I agreed with Maarten Dammers that we will ingest the lists automatically; he will support us with this. Eventually, the monuments lists will be ingested into Wikidata, and the various monuments lists on the different language versions of Wikipedia will be generated from there. Both Maarten and another guy from the Netherlands have started to work on this, and there will be a Hackathon in the Netherlands in May where they will also tackle this issue. We don't exactly know yet whether Wikidata will be ready to support this until August, but this is not a critical point; we will in any case be able to produce the lists in an automatized manner, and we will be able to ingest updates of the object lists via Wikidata next year. Point 4 seems to be the most critical one. I am ready to assume the overall coordination of the Swiss contest if there are enough other volunteers to support me. I won't have the time to carry it through virtually on my own, as Nico did in 2011, and I am not willing to pull it off at the last minute, as was the case in 2012. I will therefore focus my efforts in the next 2 weeks on building up a team supporting the contest. If you are interesting in joining, please have a look at the various tasks and sign up at the bottom of the project page, indicating in what area you would like to help: http://members.wikimedia.ch/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013<http://members.wikimedia.ch/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013#Objectives_of_the_project> . Alternatively, you can also contact me by e-mail or phone. For point 5, I am counting on your support. I've set up a project page<http://members.wikimedia.ch/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013> on the members wiki and will file an official proposal at the GA. Please have a look at the project description and let me know if you have any questions or comments. 1. I wish all of you a good week and hope to hear from you soon! 2. Beat Estermann _____________________________________________________ Beat Estermann Research Associate Bern University of Applied Sciences Business and Administration Morgartenstrasse 2a Postfach 305 CH-3000 Bern 22 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> www.e-government.bfh.ch<http://www.e-government.bfh.ch/> Phone +41 31 848 34 30 Phone (direct number) +41 31 848 34 38 Fax +41 31 848 34 31
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