Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2011/May Meeting/Notes/Full notes

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Full notes
Wiki Loves Monuments meetup
Friday 13th, 14th and 15th May 2011, Betahaus, Berlin

Attendees:

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  • Maarten Dammers - Multichill (Wikimedia Nederland)
  • Lodewijk Gelauff - Effeietsanders (Wikimedia Nederland)
  • Hay Kranen - Husky (Wikimedia Nederland, taking notes)
  • Jean-Frédéric Berthelot − Jean-Frédéric (Wikimédia France)
  • Andrea Zanni - Aubrey (WIkimedia Italy)
  • Tim Alder - Kolossos (Germany)
  • Àlex Hinojo - Kippelboy (Barcelona)
  • Niklas Laxström - Nikerabbit (Wikimedia Finland)
  • Martin Rulsch – DerHexer (local guy)
  • Kilian Kluge (Germany)
  • Gonçalo Themudo (Wikimedia Portugal)
  • Nuno Tavares (Wikimedia Portugal)
  • Tomasz Kozłowski -- odder (Wikimedia Poland)
  • Julia Koszewska (Wikimedia Poland)
  • Michael - MGA73 (Danish Wikipedia and Commons)
  • Platonides (Wikimedia Spain)
  • Raimond Spekking (Raymond, Wikimedia Deutschland)
  • Elke Wetzig (elya)
  • Raul Kern (Estonian Wikipedia)
  • Robert (Estonian Wikipedia)

Welcome & introduction

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Lodewijk opens the meetup at 09.11 and welcomes everybody, thanks all the chapters that gave financial support so people from other chapters could join.

Lodewijk gives a short introduction and mentions everybody can participate in taking notes and write his or her name and nick in the notes.

Lodewijk gives a short introduction about the history of WLM. The project originated from taking photographs of mills in the Netherlands. People made lists of all these mills and took photographs of them. Every mill in the Netherlands has a photograph and an article. After people finished that it made sense to expand the project outside the mills and take it to monuments in general. During the contest we had around 200 photographers and 12.000 photographs, many people got involved with Wikipedia as well. We provided many tools to make it easy for peop wle to upload their photos. There were many reasons why people would start photographing: people can take pictures of monuments in their neighborhood. On the website a Google Map was available with 'blue dots' tha t indicated there was a monument there but no photo.

There are five lessons we've learned
  1. Make it easy, your grandmother should understand it
  2. Make it fun. Everybody has to be able to find a monument in the close neighborhood.
  3. Wikipedia should be stressed as a selling point. Your photo gets seen by many people.
  4. Make it nearby. You want people to participate where they are.
  5. People must see the results, that something is really going on.

Introductions (prepare short summary without slides ~1 min)

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A short round of introductions starts:

  1. Gonçalo from Portugal: we have a list of monuments of many objects, around 30'000. Starting with partners and thinking about award
  2. Nuno from Portugal.

3

  1. Niklas from Finland. We currently we are still in the beginning stages, we don't have a list of monuments yet. We asked Museovirasto (National Board of Antiquities) to let us use their list, but they said no (and the person in contact with them lost interest).
  2. Martin .. from Berlin. I'm not that much involved in WLM yet.
  3. Kilian from Berlin.
  4. Olaf (Treasurer of WMDE) Germany, just wants to hear
  5. Raymond from Germany as well. The state in Germany is very complicated, we have a federal system, so every state has its own list (or doesn't have a list). It's a big task to ask every city for a list of monuments. Some say the list is secret, others do want to participate. I don't know if it is possible to get a complete list for september, but we have good hopes.
  6. Wikimedia Poland -- Tomasz Kozlowski (odder). Our list are not done as well, we have some problems with them. We have contacted a number of governmental organizations, including the ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
  7. Raul Kern. from WM Estonia. We have eight members participating in WLM, there are pictures that are not allowed on Commons but are allowed on the Estonian Wikipedia. We have a sponsor for prizes, and a sponsor for a special prize. We have applied for funding for local ...

We are planning to make an exhibition of ten to fifteen photos from the competition.

  1. Robert Reisman from Estonia as well.
  2. Jane from Wikimedia Nederland, a board member. I'm here to learn and observe
  3. Julia from Poland.
  4. Aubrey from Wikimedia Italy. We have problems with the weird Italian laws about cultural heritage. In few words, the government has "copyright" on every cultural good in Italy, a "protection" that supersed the normal copyright. So we can't make pictures of the monuments without having the permission, neither release them in Creative Commons. We are considering WLM in one district, because the government is symphatetic to our causes there. The government have all the legal rights to copyright on monuments.
  5. Jean-Frederic from Wikimedia France. We started doing cultural heritage monuments before WLM in 2009. We tagged pictures on Commons so we could have nice templates. Big advance, but we are somehow falling back right now. We are making the lists for september, it's going quite well. Our main problem is that institutions do not have geolocation tags for monuments, so we have to do that by ourselves, which is a huge work
  6. Tim Alder from WM Germany. We have 13.000 monuments in Dresden alone, and there is an interactive city map.
  7. Wikimedia Spain. My nickname is Platonides, our main problem is that the lists are split among different districts.
  8. Alex Hinojo from Catalan Wikipedia User:Kippelboy. We are trying to organize WLM in Andorra and the Catalan area. We have the same problem, all communities have their own lists without any geoinformation. We are trying to make the lists better, we have around 95% right now. [uploaded when checked online]
  9. Maarten Dammers from Wikimedia Nederland (Multichill). Organized WLM last year. We should update our lists because there is new information. We identified communication as a pain point in the project last year, we hope do that better. One of our partners is called Heemschut, which is a heritiage institution and have provided a communication person for our benefit.
  10. Hay Kranen (Husky), from Wikimedia Nederland. Did the jury last year for the Netherlands and the website as well. Was involved in organizing Wiki Loves Art (wikilovesart.nl) in 2009.
  11. Michael from Denmark (User:MGA73): talked about WLM with the Danish community: everybody thought it was a great idea, but nobody has time :). Contacted local heritiage institutions, they are very enthustiastic about WLM. We have access to a webpage with lots of information - we just need to make some good lists.
  12. Alice from WM Germany, there's nothing new i can tell you :)
  13. Lodewijk Gelauff (Effeietsanders) - Organized WLM last year.
  14. Elke - Elya (Wikimedia Deutschland) - arrived 10 h.

Lodewijk: summarizing: the lists seem to be a common problem. When we started last year we were pretty late with our lists as well, it's still possible to have a list in a few months!

Update European situation: Partners

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Maarten enlightens us about the European partners.

Last couple of weeks i've been contacting Europeana, a big portal aggregator for European cultural content. Another project is CARARE, which is a subproject of Europeana, which has lots of contacts with other European projects. You might know that the European heritage days are organized around september. It's not very well organized: there are many problems between the cultural institutions one hand, and the European organizations on the other hand.

I sent a notice around about video. One of my contacts at the Institue of Sound & Vision responded to this because of their Open Images project (www.openimages.eu), they want to sponsor as well.

This week i had a meeting with Europa Nostra, a Cultural Heritiage organization. Europa Nostra [1] is an organization that organizes many smaller volunteer organizations. They are probably going to help us as well doing PR. Other partners like OpenStreetMap and Creative Commons are also invited to join. Tomasz: we have good contacts with OSM. Maarten: there are many overlaps between those organizations.

Partners that have been confirmed will appear on the website.

Nuno: what if a local partner would want to engage in the European level? Lodewijk: we will discuss this point later on. On an European level things are starting to roll.

Collect problems & good ideas

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Lodewijk invites everyone to write down problems and good ideas on small cards and put them on the wall. 10.30: we're starting again. We tried to pick out the biggest problems, it's interesting to see that most problems are focused around a few things:

  1. The list issue: every country seems to have a problem gathering monuments lists.

We make the assumpition that most people are making lists, which is something that indicates that many people are still in the beginning phases.

  1. Commons upload wizard: the current interface is pretty horrible. It would be an option to create a special upload wizard for WLM. There are a few people uploading lots of pictures (one participant in the Dutch WLM competition did more than 1400 photographs!).
  2. Volunteers. Last year we had a small group organizing the contest, while we had a greater pool of people updating the lists. If you can get one of the heritage institutions to donate a list you can use it as a basis for your own list.
  3. Specific problems with countries (such as copyright laws in Italy).
  4. Sponsors: did people think about it yet? Sponsors are not only about the money, it is useful to look credible
  5. To much prototypes, to little tools. It would be nice if we have tools that many people can use, instead of ten countries building a Google Maps again. We're going to work on a monument API to reuse many common tasks. We need to consider internationalization as well.
  6. Slideshow tool

Lodewijk: it would be good to first proritize the technical stuff, so we can give that to the technical guys who start the hackathon later on.

  1. Commons upload wizard interface. MGA73: we could add a few questions to the upload form, to specifiy specific problems with freedom of panorama laws in countries.
  2. Tooling to find monuments (Monuments API).
  3. Mapping. Such as a Google Map with monuments. Should interface with 2).
  4. Transfer tool from Commons to Wikipedia. Would be handy for fair use / FOP images.

Elke: what do we do with different data lists? We could get Excel, PDF, lists. It needs to be converted to one format. Hay: it's difficult to make a generic tool for that.

Raul: What about augmented reality? Lodewijk: last year we had something like that, built by AB-C media in Layar.

Lodewijk: what about Commonist? Olaf: it's too complicated. Lodewijk: what if we remove all the fields that are unnecessary? Alice: maybe we could make a special version for WLM. Hay: i think we should just focus on a good web form. It's feasible to build something web-only right now, just look at wetransfer.com.

Alex: what do we do with attaching the ID to the object?

Andrea: we could bypass all licensing issues because all photographs are uploaded by their makers.

JeanFred: what about the Wikisnaps application (iPhone app for uploading photographs)? Maarten: Derk-Jan isn't coming this weekend. Hay: i guess most photographers also want to use a SLR instead of a camphone.

Alex: i think we should take advantage of geolocation stuff in smartphones. Maarten: we're already doing that with a bot on Commons.

Maarten: last year i built a few tools to make it easy for people to upload stuff. People only needed to add an ID and description, they didn't need to do all the other difficult stuff that's usally done on Commons. But that only works if you have an unique ID.

Lodewijk: is there any work needed on Flickr? Hay: people can still change their license over there, we should focus on Commons as the main platform for uploading.

Tomasz: what about global uploads from Flickr? Maarten: a bot ran every day taking all the photographs from Flickr.

Elke: what about transferring data to templates? Maarten: it would not be that hard to write, i'll put it on the list. It's just something like a CSV file that outputs template names.

JeanFred: what about OSM integration? Lodewijk: is there anything that needs to be done? Tim: the question is how to import the data into OSM. Jane: it would be great to have the same data model for monuments on both OSM and Commons.

Raul: what about the image viewer for the jury work? It would be really handy The image viewer would also be useful for random people to favourite pictures. The group is split into a technical and non-techie group.

break

2 groups:

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  • small group about tech stuff
  • big group about the other collected problems

Technical group

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Maarten opens the meeting at 11.25. There are two subjects

1) Upload wizard

User stories
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The user wants to create an account to upload a pictures
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Background: the Commons interface is difficult, could we use an API to register accounts? use case : user wants to upload a picture:

  • He's logged → UploadWizard
  • He's not → Create an account?

Raymond : WMF works on Account Creation Approvement, how to relate to that? → Ask guillom :-) What about another website, like the Swiss one? Hay: we really don't want to have more than one account. One of the goals is to get more people to work on Commons, not to have many accounts.

The users needs to be redirected to the uploadform with a preselection from their origin website
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Most users will originate from the local website (such as wlm.nl) and can have a preselection on the upload form.

The user wants to upload a picture =
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We should use the upload wizard. Neil said the upload wizard is pretty customizable. JeanFred: what about the uploadform of last year? Maarten: it's all a big Javascript hack. We're re-writing the form at loading time.

2) Maps tool / API

Focus on things that require a technical solution:

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  1. make a list based on most pressing problems
  2. what are the solution concepts
  3. specifications

Non-technical group

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Lodewijk ask how should we start working

Alice: The list problem is something with different levels (categories, lists,...) one of the difficulties is about getting information about monuments.

Lists
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Lodewijk: I think there are 2 problems: one with multiple lists and the other with non-cooperative institutions

Alice: Third problem is sometimes there are no lists.

Processing lots of data is a problem.

Lodewijk: Lists are not complete and/or exact (coordinates/addresses/names)

Alice: We've got mistakes in lists, but there is not actually a big issue

Gonçalo: This is something you can propose as a benefit for list providers. Wikipedians will correct errors and you can use them back in your lists.

Lodewijk: About getting the lists: specially in Germany you've got lots of institutions to get rid with

Alice: We haven't people in each local region, so we have lists in certain countries and try to complete them now, but we've got gaps. We haven't any centralised institution. each country ("Bundesland") have its own registration policies

Tomasz: We've got the same problem on Poland. It's not a federative country but we have to deal with the same issue

Alex: It's the same in Spain. Different lists w/ different kind of developement

Andrea: What do they give you when they give you a list? How are the lists made?

Alice: Some lists are handwritten.

Tomasz: Or scanned into a PDF without OCR.

Alice: in germany we've got different countries with different legal statements. Sometimes the city itselfs keeps the "official list" but in another regions categorization levels are quite different. We've got some problems in "door openings", it depends on the country. Germany will not have a complete list of monuments for this competition. 14.000 monuments in Dresden alone. 700.000 monuments in Germany.

Tomasz: Wich is the % of handwritten lists?

Kilian: 10% at most, probably less (the first problem is to actually get and digitalize the lists, putting the information on wikipedia is the second problemed problem)

Andrea: You could ask the german community of Wikisource for help.

Tomasz: Wiki community could provide digital version of lists to the institutions.

Alice: Maybe they are not interested in things like this. And tourism office don't have the skills or access to this kind of lists.

Kilian: They are some local wikipedians who take care of the lists in their area, but if there are no local wikipedians interested, we probably won't get the lists done until september...

Alice: We need so many information ...we are just not knowing who is the right person to talk to.

Lodewijk: A solution is to get local people to contact the local government.

Alex: Maybe you should focus on the regions where you're better . In Spain we are promoting local contests in regions where we have done lists.

Tomasz: Poland has a constitutional right to access public information.

Lodewijk: Could give problems as it can be viewed as a hostile request.

Kilian: Not so much a problem of asking for lists and not getting them, but not knowing who is the right person to ask for the lists. IN Baden-Württemberg, in many regions they just send mails to people who lives in monuments, so there nobody really knows what the monuments are (Lodewijk: So essentially, there are no monuments)

Jean: Maybe we should locate list IN wikipedia that they've already been done in wikipedia, not in government. Also try to find groups like the "windmill guys" on wikipedia-nl

Lodewijk: So you mean focusing on an existing lists instead of a full heritage list.

Jean: Give a starting point to the people. Maybe an editable lists that people will increase ontime.

Lodewijk: It's problematic when people define monuments themselves

Lodewijk: Second point: Cooperation.

Niklas: Had email conversation with the board. Didn't give the lists. They didn't give any reason.

Lodewijk: No reason why? We've got conseil de l'europe and another huge European institutions...maybe there is a general "european" approach that we should use. Try the "sandwich approach".

Alex: Shouldn't that be useful for Germany as well?

Alice: The problem is that Nobody knows the name of the people to talk to.

Kilian: even The national heritage institution (which is more like a public relations/lobbying organization) doesn't know it. The only thing that we can try is use volunteer wikipedians. We can't go the other way around. We don't know what we are missing.

MGA73: So perhaps the only way is to write down something like "In this region/town we do not have a list of monuments. If you know about a list or the monuments please add it."

Alice: Even the legals basis is different from state to state and sometimes even from region to region.

Olaf: In Lower Saxony we have a list of 80.000 monuments. Could be used as an example for other German states to follow.

MGA73: In Denmark government wanted to know what we are going to do with their metadata and if there are copyright issues. As far as we know there is none.

Lodewijk: Maybe you should contact rakennusperinto guys (www.rakennusperinto.fi), they organize the open monument days in finland

You could also try to approach throuhgh an interestate organisation such as UNESCO

Lodewijk: How can we manage lists of 80.000 monuments? In Amsterdam we've got 12.000 monuments, so we basically split them up into usable lists (200 at most) Divide by city, divide by neighbourhoods, market square...

Tomasz: In Poznan the list is not that big (300 monuments) but the lists are sorted alphabetically, just because this is how we received them. We can't have them all on one list because the number of templates per page is limited.

Lodewijk: Information missing in lists?

Tomasz: Unique IDs, Coordinates, Address (Street Name), Street Number, City, Description Coordinates sometimes coded as 0N OE which are in fact missing.

Lodewijk: Maarten started something (API) to update both manually wiki lists and our main database of monuments.

Alice: In Germany we can't think about getting a unique identifier from government so maybe we should start our own registry or identifier, but we didn't discuss that in detail yet.

Other topics
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Lodewijk: AT nederlands we learned there are 2 ways people look for monument registrys: Wikipedia and maps (scrolling and zooming). The monument pops up and has a field with the unique ID. That's what people remember where they were

Jean: In Haarlem the first lists of monuments is from 1907. Since then, the address has changed twice, so we really do need a map functionality

Lodewijk: We need a search functionality for monument name.

Gonçalo: In Portugal we've got side names, like populars names to monuments.

Jean: Camera captures geocoordinates can be away from coordinated of monuments.

Alice: How did you/are you going to contact people in your local communities? Involve other communities: Flickr, OSM, etc. Local Jury?

Lodewijk: Public Relations?

Alex: Maybe the European touch is "engaging" catalan people and organisations to participate in the contest

Alice & Kilian: We don't have the impression that community is answering us

Alex: They are very interested, and enthusiastic as it is a european competition.

Lodewijk: Keep statistics by regions. Gets the users to compete to get the highest number of monuments with a photo.

Jane: In the Nederlands we have loads of local magazines that they are looking for easy to publish news. WLM it's a great one.

Lodewijk: Some non-wikipedians read the news and thought "I can do that" and they started to edit and they "got stuck" on Wikipedia and did other edits. Motivate people and THANK people it's really important. It's more a gesture that definitely an amount of money.

Lodewijk: Jury: the guidelines should be something of an European Topic. It's very important to LAY OUT a very clear Timeline. We recommend one room, no key, crappy food and wait....

MGA: The jury member could perhaps choose 3-5 photos each to go to the final round.

Lodewijk:100 hundred photos per person of the jury could also work. The important thing is time pressure. Jury has to know that they have to agree "tonight". Important to select the right jury. They have to like to watch photos. Ideas for jury: Professional photographer, creative commons photographer, wikipedian, organizer.

13
00 lunch
14:00 Discussion of good ideas!

A good ideas discussion

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Lodewijk: Let's discuss the good ideas that were put on the wall.

  1. introducing new people to the project
  2. contacting partners.
  3. merchandising and public relations

Starting with #3:

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Maarten: Met with Europa Nostra this week, they will publish an article in their magazine which comes out next week if we write/create it before Sunday (-> Working group)

Lodewijk, Andrea, Elke, Julia and Tomasz will try to write it down at http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/NostraArticle

Lodewijk: Focused on local newspapers, "photograph a monument in X, help Wikipedia and win a prize" ("there are still Y monuments left in X -> seems very local/"personalized"), requires a lot of help from volunteers, one person can't do that (create a press release with blanks to fill in -> low threshold)

Other ideas?

  • Local Prizes for photographs from certain cities ("It's YOUR city", local institutions/government supports it)
  • Organize meetings of interested photographers (w/ local government/organization support), give out tasks/challenges, give them a certain amount of time and upload the pictures later that day (example: "Wikipedia takes Haarlem"), don't necessarily need prizes, but have some gadgets to give to participants
  • T-Shirts are difficult to carry and distribute, 50 shirts are already hard to handle
  • Lodewijk: If there is a big monument, you can organize an event INSIDE the monument (you can take hundreds of photos of the monument, which is a really good documentation), doesn't increase the number of monuments photographed much, but helps getting people excited
  • Poland: Have some friends at the radio. (idea for Germany: dradiowissen?)
  • Andrea: "Adopt a Photo" Use the infrastructure of an existing concept ("Adopt a ...") of a tourist office (aim: get information about a region, by tourists as well as locals, who are the main target group) to promote WLM
  • Possible Partners: Tourist Offices, Photographer organizations, magazines and contests,
  • In Germany they visit schools and tell about Wikipedia - what it is and how it works. Could be combined with WLM. Perhaps the school could make a local contest. There actually was a similar contest last year (Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz - german foundation for heritage)
This years's contest: http://www.tag-des-offenen-denkmals.de/fokus/ (contact!? -> Wikimedia Deutschland)
Maarten: Use existing communities, don't try to build up new ones, so if there are similar contests perhaps joining them is better than starting your own.
Invite Flickr users (Lodewijk: maximum number of messages per day, though, so keep that in mind)
  • Video contest
Maarten: There are 10M images at the Commons and maybe only around 10,000 video files. There is a Dutch organisation which supported :Maarten's idea of organising a video contest.
Changing the file formats allowed on Commons is too big of an issue - so don't start that discussion, it won't end until September... ;) [We may use an on-line platform to easily convert video files to .ogv, though.]

Sponsors

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Lodewijk: What could sponsors sponsor?

  • Magazines: Good PR-sponsors
  • Sponsors for prizes
  • Have lots of smaller prizes to give out to winners of local contests, participants with e.g. 50+ uploads
    • Ideas: Museum tickets/cards (free entrance etc.)
  • Have sponsors for local events (ideas: sponsor cars to get photographers around, road trips, photographers (equipment?), maybe an air trip by helicopter or hot air balloon? as a prize, just for fun)
  • Flight clubs/schools could give discounts to WLM-photographers so they can take aerial pictures of monuments
  • Maarten: It's much easier to get something from someone you know than from someone you just call for the first time - use existing contacts (especially the bigger chapters)
  • Partner with European Heritage Days (september 11th i guess?):
    • Maarten: It's organized by the Council of Europe every year, it's not strongly organized, everybody does what they like since the CoE doesn't have any money -> get in contact with local organizing comitees and cooperate/schedule your local events around their events
    • Lodewijk: The idea is that monuments which are usually closed get opened for just one day, so the local organizers have really good connections with house owners etc, so you can use that for WLM
    • ??: You can organize a WLM photography exhibition in and around monuments (maybe with last year's winners, but maybe in 2012 since we only have NL-pictures by now)
    • Organize tours/get in touch with organizations of tours (for tourists/locals) through cities/towns on these days, so try to get WLM into those programs through local contacts,
      • have WLM as such in the printed stuff
      • organize tours along monuments to have them photographed for the contest (maybe the less famous/central monuments)
  • get college students (architecture, photography?) involved (might be difficult in some countries since there are no classes in September, so students are hard to reach)
    • idea: include WLM into an introductory week where new students get to know the town

Maarten: If you're actually working on an idea that looks promising, send an e-mail to the list so others can participate, support and take advantage of the work already done so we can keep track of what's going on

Andrea: We're talking about reaching people interested in monuments, photography, heritage, local history etc but they might not be able/scared of the idea of uploading to commons/"the internet". So maybe set up a hotline of some kind to support them.

Maarten: Upload is a huge problem, we're trying to make it as easy as possible, but there definetely is the need for some kind of help desk

Elya: Did we decide on the responsibilty for the national websites yet?

Lodewijk: The local organization is in charge of setting up and running their website. code sharing etc is encouraged, but in the end every national chapter needs to do it on their own

Share ideas, copy good concepts, provide information and how-tos for new participants

Alice: Give hints on the photography itself, e.g. some tips on how to take good pictures

Maarten: Suggest taking pictures from different perspectives etc.

Lodewijk/Maarten: In our experience: Less is more

Elya: We need a contact address for inquiries etc

Hay: If you want to make a website just like or in the style of the NL-WLM-sites, go to https://github.com/hay/wmnl-theme, it's a WordPress theme you can use.

15:00 competition concept: for our european partners we need a uniform description of what the contest is about, so lets make sure we all fit in!

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RULES & THE LIKE

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Maarten: The rules should be easy to understand, short and should be the same for all over Europe

Last year's rules were:

  • Photo has to be self-taken
  • you need to confirm the e-mail-adress (so WLM can reach you)
  • needs to be free license
  • we need an id
  • uploaded in september

Discussion on the Timeline

Poland: Extend/shift WLM to October

Maarten: European Heritage Days are organized in September, also, don't make the contest too long, you will get to many pictures Is starting September 1st a problem? Does anybody want to start earlier?

Poland: Thought about giving out prices at our conference on September 25th?

Lodewijk: Take into account that the jury needs some time to get through all the pictures, last year we had 12.000 and expect to have more this year

Maarten: Think about using the conference for photo taking/promotion

Maarten: Going to present the prizes on Nov 5th at our national conference, that's not too late and enough time for the jury to decide Maarten. European jury starts to work in November (national contest should be done by then) and presents the results/winners in December Is there a need for an award ceremony?

Lodewijk: depends on the budget you have, really

Maarten: combine it w/ sth. (Lodewijk: just 10 ppl in a cafe is rather boring ;) )

L: Decide on the end dates (especially a problem for those having the National Heritage Days in October, afaik only Spain)

Alex: Not a problem for us, we can finish September 30th

Elya: Remember that it's the tenth anniversary of 9/11, so towards the mid of September it will be all 9/11 in the media

L: Our main PR period will be the end of August and the very beginning of September and towards the end of the month, but still keep 9/11 in mind

L: Last year we had submission(!) from 1st to 30th, didn't care when it was taken (you can't verify that anyway)

M: Heritage Days are in September everywhere, it's not even sure for Spain (yet), sometimes also depends on the region you're in since it's not centralized (see above as well)

M: You can check on the number of participants in the Heritage Days on the website coe.int (link on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011/European_Heritage_Days)

M: Problematic point: Freedom of panorama in estonia and france

Jean-Frederic: We want to educate people on that, it's difficult, we try to make little booklets explaining stuff, otherwise we have to delete it

M: Kind of like Fair Use?

J-F: Yes, but I personally don't like those exceptions

L: So you want to prevent those from being uploaded?

J-F: Yes

M: Might not be good for a free content contest if the winning picture is not free (Maybe you could use WLM to campaign for a change in law?)

Estonia: In estonian wikipedia we license the pictures under CC but add a template explaining the restrictions and conditions, generally non-commercial use is allowed and some certain commercial uses are allowed. those can participate in the local competition but not in the european competition

Elya: Provide a fact sheet that helps photographers explain what they're doing to people who are suspicious when their houses are photographed

L: mostly a German issue (street view discussion)

M: It's an important point, but not part of the concept, so make a best practices sheet for germany and share it

M: Take care that there are no people in the pictures, that helps a lot already

RULES

[edit]

M: Do we want more rules? We need to agree on those now.

L: (as said above) We should have the same rules everywhere, so tourists etc don't get confused and it feels more like one contest rather than several different ones

requirements for local contests (suggestions)
  • run from 1st to 30th of september
  • local jury has to be ready by October 31
  • participating photographs need to be CC-licensed, favorably CC-BY-SA (acceptable on Wikimedia Commons, exceptions for local wikipedias possible if there are legal issues)
  • there needs to be a list of or a clear definition of what a monument is
rules
  • have to take the photo yourself (L: Dont want to deal with OTRS requests, Elya. keep it simple)
  • has to be CC-BY-SA (see above as well)
  • needs to be uploaded in september (date taken does not matter, you can't verify it so you can't enforce another rule) L: People will always say it's unfair, no matter how you make the rules
  • picture has to have an identifier (either government-provided or other, even if it's done by adress and state, geo-tag etc.)
  • and e-mail address needs to be activated in order to receive a happy winning message (photo won't be deleted, but you can't participate in the contest, checked only when the top ten/a shortlist is determined, too much effort to check for everybody)

M: Focused on and promoted uploading to commons, but allowed Flickr as well, all uploads to Flickr get transferred to Commons by Bot every day, transfer is moderated

Raimond: Should we use Flickr this year? We should focus on Commons and nothing else!

L: Depends on the country. If you have a platform with hundreds or thousands of possible participants, use it!

Elya: It has to be managable

L: Yes, but if the tagging/categories aren't right, we didn't consider the picture

L: Some Flickr users were even "converted" to Commons

What you probably should include: The winner announced by the jury is the winner, there is no way to challenge that decision If some long, strict rules are needed for legal reason : do it the CC-style (some short, clear, understandable rules and everything else somewhere in the background)

L: Minor rules like "jury members can't participate in the contest" were put as remarks, it's not really interesting nor valuable information for participants

M: The rules we have are the spirit of the contest, so all other rules should be similar/in the same spirit Price categories (should be changed/planned by country)

L: It was always about the content, not about technical things or usability in Wikipedia most objects is better than most photographs, otherwise you might get 1000 pictures of the same castle

Elya: How to you count objects if you don't have numbers/codes as identifiers like it's the case in Germany? Suggestions: Go by adress, geo location, maybe change category to "towns taken"

Alice: Categories have to be feasible for the circumstances in your country

Elya: We should have at least one quantity based prize

M: we had local prizes last year, there could also be a sponsor for certain kinds of objects, e.g. the best picture of a castle, a windmill, most images per country/district

L: The better the database, the more categories you can have

Alice: We could use Wikipic, where you can find pictures independent of description, language etc, it was developed by Daniel Kinzler of WM Germany.

L: Put that on the mailing list, it's too technical to discuss.

L: the concept is clear now, let's have a break

16:00 European level competition: (fixed time slots, if we dont reach conclusion, we continue next day in detail)

[edit]

THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE is now officially supporting Wiki Loves Monuments! Yeah!

-> press release?: No.

M: No, the national WLM-organizers should do their own PR, but we can coordinate it, e.g. we could have a press release with updates on WLM next week from each country. (no to early - just an announcement on VP)

L: we agreed on a federal contest, so let's start with the federal level

  1. Jury
  2. Awards and Prices
  3. Ceremony
  4. Nomination procedure
  5. Budget
1 Jury

How should it work? What kind of jury do we want? Traditional jury? Eurovision Song Contest like jury with points per country?

M: For our local jury last year, we wanted a balanced jury (see also notes from the session this morning) : photographers, wikimedians, heritage folks

Alice: Suggestion: Build the european jury from the local juries

M: How big should the jury be? (One per country is too much!)

Alice: Not too large, 5-6 persons is enough

Raimond: 3 wikipedians, 3 photographers, 3 heritage guys = 9 people

L: Shall the jury meet in person? That's going to be expensive, so if they are supposed to meet we should keep it small

M: 5-8 and see how it works in practice "crowd:" number should be odd (5 or 7)

L: dont worry too much about that

Alice: also depends on how the jury votes

Things we agree on:

  • Wikipedians in the jury
  • People from multiple countries (international jury)
  • if we coorperate w/ european organizations, they should be able to send one or two jurors as well

L: Jury is better than a Eurovision-SC-system, since in my opinion everybody knows what a jury is but a nation based voting system will quickly raise stereotypes etc

MGA73-: Can be hard to only have 5-8 members if 6 organizations all send one or two jurors :-)

M: Yeah we should only have a few from the organizations.

Good suggestions for the jury should be sent to the mailing list

2 Awards

L: What kind of prizes do we want? Big? Small? Many? Few?

M: We should get organizations to sponsor the awards and not buy the awards

Alice: Three higher value prices, then many smaller prizes

Andrea: When we have 12 winners, we can do a calendar (M: We're going to make a calendar, that's set!)

Jane: A prize could be a weekend in/near a monument

Tomasz: Picnic inside a special building

M: We need to have lots of goodies, but probably not as prizes

3
Ceremony

European Heritage Conference in Rotterdam at the start of December (Maarten is already invited as a speaker)

Jean-Frederic: We could do our own conference with heritage people speaking etc

M: If we get European organizations to sponsor us, we could have Brussel or Strasbourg as a location

L: We still have an invitation from Google for Brussel

M: If we're doing a conference, we need some people who organize it instead of working on WLM itself

Alice: We should have the ceremony as part of some other event

Ceremony should happen somewhere between end of November and beginning of January

http://www.dish2011.nl

Andrea: A prize could also be the flight to the conference

L: flying people in is expensive

a conference is not interesting for every participant, it might be boring or even a punishment ;)

In France : http://www.patrimoineculturel.com/ 3-6 November − nice for our own ceremony

L: Do you want a ceremony or do we just want to announce the winners at a conference? The prize could then be delivered/presented by the local chapter

PRO

  • PR
  • Awesomeness

CONTRA

  • money
  • organizational effort
  • short time for preparation for the participants (just a few weeks)

suggestion: have the local ceremony later and have a live stream of the announcement of the european winners

L: it's hard to organize this...

MGA73: Think it is a bad idea. It "spoils the fun". If we have a local contest we have a local winner. If we join it all it will probably not feel like someone from our country won (provided it was someone from another country that won the european contest).

4 Nomination procedure

M: What should we do? Let all 100 K files (?) be a part of the contest? Only the winner from each country? The x best from each country?

(Discussion)

2/3 thinks more photos from each country.

There are a lot of open questions so lets take a break and think about it.

5 Budget

There was a discussion about the budget but concensus was lets find out what we want to do before we ask for money :-)

17
30 short break

17:45 wrapup

[edit]

what else should we discuss: other sessions tomorrow?

Open Issues that need to be solved

  • amount of pictures in the final
  • pics vs the people (can one photographer participate multiple times?)
  • Budget and what the budget is supposed to be used for
  • ceremony vs announcement and where
  • who's in the jury
  • Jury criteria
  • Europa Nostra article (has to be finished on Sunday) [2]
  • National jury deadline
  • European Sponsors - what do we want and what can they expect from us?
  • National partners - a brainstorming session
  • Goodies & Merchandise
  • OpenStreetMap integration (not just technical, this is long term)
  • Local VP announcement - Wednesday next week
  • Uploadform/wizard
  • Commonist tool
  • Monuments API
  • Conversion tool

M+L: Lets stop for now - we can add more later :-)

DAY 2

[edit]

Europanostra article ready to proofread: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/EuropaNostra

[edit]

European Jury criteria

[edit]
  • Nominated by local contests
  • Technical quality
    • Sharpness, use of light, perspective, color hue, megapixels (?), what about retouched images? (overprocessed images were excluded last year -> have to be realistic)
  • Originality
  • Usefulness for Wikipedia

Video contest is a separate topic so videos can be uploaded but they do not have a chance to win the contest

Photos or people?

[edit]

Should it be possible for one person to win all the prizes? Or more than one prize? Could be possible for one person to take part in different countries with lots of good images.

No formal rule, but the jury should try to distribute the prizes evenly and fairly. "With equal quality, prefer diversity" We won't include this into the rules, since it might keep people from submitting pictures. -> Message to the participants: "The more pictures you submit, the higher are the chances of winning"

Nomination procedure

[edit]

How many pictures can be submitted per country?

Only one picture
  • Advantages: of only one picture: Known concept, easy to understand
  • Disadvantage: High pressure on the jury (not much too choose from)
Multiple Pictures
  • Advantages:
    • More contest
    • more room for the jury
    • "if you don't win locally, you still can win the european contest"
  • Disadvantages:
    • Could be awkward if the 8th place of one country wins the european contest
    • makes it hard to have a price ceremony (if we want that)

-> We will have the local juries send 10 pictures. It is up the local juries how they compile their selection, e.g. one jury could choose to send the best 6 from the "best picture" category and four from the "best artistic quality" category

composition of the jury

[edit]

Yesterday we agreed on: We should have Wikipedians as well as outside experts (professional photographers, photo editors, monuments experts...)

Today we have to agree on the number of members and how they will be selected

  • Suggestion: Every local jury sends/names a member (but that will result in a really large jury which makes it difficult to decide on a winner and it's close to impossible for them to meet in person)
  • The jury should be well balanced, no group should have a majority
  • A Wikipedian would be nice because (s)he could judge the usefulness of the image for Wikipedia

Julia: The jury should represent the spirit/concept of the contest, so what exactly do we want the jury to represent? Do we want representatives of every country, showing the federal organization of Europe? Or do we rather want to stress the unity of Europe? Then we should have a smaller, international jury.

MGA73: We could also have a vote on Commons like with "Picture of the year".

Pro: "It's wiki loves monuments", so let the Wikipedians decide, it's a way to keep people on commons (might not work, you need a certain number of edits in order to vote to check for sockpuppets)

Contra: people might vote for pictures of their country only, everybody will vote according to his/her criteria (voting for the monument and not for the picture), number of voters might be quite low, it's hard to get people to vote, it's not that appealing for the outside world (opposed to having an expert jury of professionals and experienced wikipedians)

Jean-Frederic: "The jury is not the goal, but the mean" -> The goal is to have many pictures taken and promote the idea of Wikipedia

Informal Vote: Jury 7 Public Vote 2 -> We go for the jury, there can be local public votes etc

Tomasz suggests a Public Price voted on by Wikipedians on Commons

Lodewijk: Could increase jury bashing, a lot of time involved

-> WLM-pictures can participate in Picture of the Year as well, there could even be a monuments category

Note: Jane suggested to have a category of "Most used WLM-picture at the end of September (# of articles in different languages)"

Rejected, because a) only big monuments will have a chance b) if it's big, there are many pictures of similar quality and usefulness c) will most likely lead to edit wars

Who should be in the jury?

MGA73: Ask the winner of the Picture of the Year on Commons since he/she is a really good photographer.

DerHexer: Or last year's winner of WLM in the Nederlands?

Lodewijk: Jury should be composed of Europeans, since other countries/cultures have quite a different understanding of what a monument is.

Jean-Frederic: Do you have to be a Wikipedian to judge the usefulness for Wikipedia? Tomasz: Probably yes, since most people enjoy beautiful pictures (sunsets...) and aren't that aware of encyclopaedic use

Lodewijk: Wikipedians should be specialists for pictures/monuments

So jury should be:

  • 2 Professional photographers/Photo editors
  • 2 Heritage specialists (one from Europeana)
    • incl: 1 person sent by the Council of Europe (probably from the European Heritage Days)
  • 3 Wikimedians (ideas: Winner of POTY/WLM10, list specialist, someone involved with organizing Commons POTY)
  • 1 facilitator

Total of 8 people

Things to consider:→ jury should be balanced, geographically as well as by gender (but neither of those should be the sole reason someone is on the jury)

MGA73: I think we should choose the best and not take (or exclude) someone just because we want to "spread" the jury.

Julia: that's why it's to consider not obligatory criteria for composition of jury → Prefer diversity

DEADLINES:
  • Formation of the European jury: September 30 23:59:59 GMT+1
  • Local juries send their nominations to the European jury (deadline): October 31st 23:59:59 GMT+1

Who will coordinate the jury, push them to work? (jury chair/facilitator)(that does not have the right to vote/is a member of the jury)

Andrea: Have a Commons guy involved with POTY to get the jury working

Alice: How do we find the members for the jury?

Lodewijk: Every country has to submit at least one candidate

Procedure: Put them on the mailing list or, if it's sensitive, contact Maarten directly

Afternoon session split into three groups: Technical stuff, Ceremony, and Awards. The last two will then join to talk about the budget

Ceremony

Should there be a ceremony or a jury? Ceremony costs much more budget, announcement is somewhat duller.

For announcement another event joining would be nice. When ceremony, GLAM-event might be interesting too. Our own event is waaaay too much work. Ceremony is too much organizing (travelling etc), so we have a preference for an announcement. Partnering with DISH combined with a talk about WLM (action Maarten), backup: Wikipedia Academy? No idea yet for the rest.

Awards

Local vs European

General considerations:

  • The prizes are to be provided by the sponsor (possibly).
  • The prizes should be useful and reused for the projects (voucher for new camera lens, technological prizes
  • The n-th prize gets n-th choice?

European:

Price for the 3 best.

Top-12 or all finalists can get a calender. Shipping to be considered. Tomasz is taking the lead.

Would be nice if it can be related.

Top-3 ideas:

  • travel agency to sponsor a trip? (Kilian takes the lead -> will ask Nicole (Wikimedia Germany, responsible for WLM))
  • Trip to Tallinn or Guimarães (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Capital_of_Culture) - Tallin European Capital of Culture 2011, Guimarães for 2012 (Nuno and Raul will take the lead to call the organizers, otherwise we should add this to the travel agency part)

@Nuno: http://www.guimaraes2012.pt/ :) @Raul: http://www.tallinn2011.ee/eng :)

  • EuroRail
  • Photo equipment voucher (250 - 500 euro)
  • computer equipment?
  • iSomething/ebook reader
  • WikiReader

(Amazon.com voucher for each prize. We want the winners to choose from a list of prizes)

MGA73: I'm thinking 500 or 1.000 euro is very cheap for a sponsor. We can give them promotion in all Europe for just that? It should be 10.000 or something :-)

Technical things (mostly Maps)

[edit]

(See other notes)

BUDGET

[edit]
  • Prizes (1500€) (if no sponsors is found)
  • Printing 500 calendars (WMPL will find budget locally): 3000 euro
  • shipping + boxes, winning messages and so on. ( 200 for finalists + 300 for the chapters)
  • Intl. thankyou goodies (calendars will go for that now)
  • grant system for chapters that need help. 1500 euro
  • Optional: Jury costs? (7 people (says 8 above)): 2400 (travel) + 400 (hotel) + 200 (meeting room) + 300 (living costs) = 3300 euro
  • Announcement costs? 1000 euro (worst case)

  • TOTAL: 10.300€ + shipping − worst case scenario / best-case scenario : 3000€

Calendar: http://www.flyeralarm.com/de/produkte/11210/kalender/mehrseitige-kalender/250g-bilderdruck-glaenzend-mit-spiralbindung/4-4-farbig/58-seiter/din-a4 (they only ship to Germany, though)

  • delete in left side menu: "international site"
  • Add WP and WM logos
  • Make link to Commons not as big (less visible)
  • Short description what the project is about (in English)
  • Contact
  • Press page with logo kit (and a CC-BY-SA logo)
  • Twitter stream
  • Link to facebook fan page
  • Link to Twitteraccount
  • Latest uploaded photos
  • Photo counter (maybe per country?)
  • Make it more visible which countries participate without needing a hover
  • Add local partners on the .eu site as well in a rotating schedule
  • Have a map of all monuments on the project

-> suggestion for national contest's sites to include short description about European level of contest

-> idea for motto of the contest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_Michigan Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (Latin "If you seek a monument, look around you")

  • Engage people on the map (especially to keep them around the project/website untill September)

Short introduction for the website

[edit]

Wiki Loves Monuments is European photo contest around monuments in 15 countries.

In September 2011 everyone can participate and have a chance to win a cool price.

The contest is organized by Wikimedia, the movement behind Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the popular free encyclopedia. The purpose of Wikipedia and this contest is to share information and knowledge.

Cultural heritage is an important part of the knowledge Wikipedia aims to collect and share. An image tells more than a thousand words and can be useful in many different languages at the same time. Cultural heritage is around the corner - almost everywhere. And even locals can (re-)discover the cultural, historical or scientific significance of their neighborhood.

The contest is inspired by the highly successful 2010 pilot in the Netherlands, resulting in more than 12,500 new images under a free license, which can be used in Wikipedia and by anybody for any purpose.

Any support - from a single image in the contest to spreading the word or becoming a partner - is warmly welcomed. This coming September, cultural heritage will be in the spotlight of Wikipeda from Portugal to Estonia.

17:20 A wrap-up: Are there any more issues that need to be discussed?

[edit]

M: Upload wizard for the WLM will be done by Neil from the Foundation, all issues will be addressed.

M: Maarten has already started working on maps and tools for them.

L: Lodewijk has talked about what has been done this afternoon.

National partners

[edit]

JF : How to get started ? Who to contact ?

→ Cultural heritage societies

We can get recommendations from European level

idea: writing a short manual on how to organize things on national level

Poland : Get a list of NGO & govermental bodies related to

→ Send email, and, call, and call again... « Do you want to join the project ? It's huge, volunteer driven. Be part of the Jury, we love what you do »

Gains : Technical advantages (IDs for the lists), PR, credibility, maybe financial support...

(It went all the way up to the Ministry for Culture !)

Maarten : do not ask for prizes on the first call :) First step is to attach their names to our project so we get credibility & they get awareness → easy & cheap.

-> declaration of partnership - template ready to sign https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0Bxqc-h6CbDADYjk5YWRiZDEtYzM5Ni00ZGZkLWI4ZjMtM2IzZTM5NTdlZTA0&hl=pl

SJ : typology of partnerships ?

ideas for partners:

  • NGOs
  • tourism offices
  • public administration offices: from local offices for protection of heritage or alike up to ministery of culture/national heritage or alike
  • use national chapters of European level partners (CoE etc)
  • owners of the monuments (i.e. museums, associations of owners of monuments)
  • groups/organisations of potential contest participants

How to use our existing partners to approach others ?

Maarten : best is to get introduced by our friends. Ask Maarten, he will ask his contacts « My friend from X is trying to get in touch with SomeBigInstitution, do you happpen to have a contact etc. ? »

Julia: careful not to look like "orders from the top", motivation is usually higher when one aspires up then receives orders from top

Andrea : What about Europeana ?

Finland

[edit]

Problem contacting the body responsible for monuments data

→ Maarten may help :)

Estonia

[edit]

Two big approaches:

  • Churches institution →

Julia : contacts with religious bodies (both local level and high level)

Lodewijk : promote WLM on churches doors "My church is on WLM!"

→ In Poland, contact 175 registered churches and religious associations (non-NGOs)

Maarten : Partner with local CC & OSM

  • CC: Always nice ot have the stamp of approval ; there is a European coordinator (see with WmDe)
  • OSM : same goals as ours, community might want to join

→ Lots of contacts in our communities, easy way to go

Great Cooperation WPDE/WMDE&OSM

Important for OSM is that the monument lists are reusable (legal question). CC-BY-SA should be ok in the moment, later ODBL.

Sebastian: Wikipedia for World Heritage loves Wiki Loves Monuments and would be happy to support (http://wikimedia.de/wiki/WorldHeritage/the_idea)

For OSM Wiki-page created: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments

SJ : EUNIC (National Institute of Culture) ? (UNESCO group dedicated to culture preservation)t

http://www.eunic-online.eu/

UNESCO ?

Big & slow ; might be worth inviting them to be a sponsor, they might do it next year→

Julia will try to reach UNESCO in Poland (not only - if needed ;) ), the Paris people may try to connect with the Paris UNESCO office) there are national UNESCO Chapters too

SJ :Free Culture world ?

Global Humanities groups, international foundations dedicated to dessiminate information about culture : there are who promote WHS, probalby some who promote national monuments

→ need an international point of contact ; OTRS queue info-xxx@wikilovesmonuments.eu (action Raimond) → can be done by the WE

Julia : cooperation with YfJ (European Youth Forum: youthforum.org ) - contact [Julia]

idea of SJ: ICOMOS http://www.icomos.org/ [International Council of Monuments and Sites]

Cultural Heritage Magazine, good for PR before or after the contest

→ Surely one in every country, but need to be contacted in advance

Program of Sunday

[edit]

Meeting at 11:00

  • Technical
    • upload Wizard In progress
    • API in progress
  • Goodies !!!!!
  • Structure information (action : L)
    • external − Website
    • Internal → ?
  • Writing session for Village pump announcements
  • Communication
    • ML, IRC, ?

every second week: 7 meetings online, make a planning (detailed calendar to be decided tomorrow)

Goodies session tonight !

[edit]

Goodies-storming:

CHEAP GOODIES

[edit]
  1. Pens, pencils
  2. baloons
  3. frisbee
  4. beach ball
  5. hats
  6. stickers
  7. mousepads
  8. lanyards
  9. postcard
  10. playing cards
  11. bookmarks
  12. fridge magnets
  13. WLM pins
  14. bumper stickers
  15. WP stressball
  16. carrying bags
  17. mon-u-mints
  18. envelopes
  19. 3d WLM logo key-hanger `-- key design with logo
  20. Wunderbaum --> WikiLovesMonumentsbaum
  21. QR code stickers
  22. Wikiqoute fortune cookies
  23. cubic sugar
  24. hair-bands with W logo
  25. pocket liners

NOT-SO-CHEAP GOODIES

[edit]
  1. T-shirts
  2. calendars
  3. mugs
  4. caps
  5. camera mount
  6. bikes, helmet
  7. digital photo framel
  8. USB sticks
  9. see-trough umbrella -- puzzle top
  10. W cufflinks
  11. phone socks
  12. laptop skins
  13. camera lenzes cap
  14. WLM or WP flags (50x50 cm?)
  15. WLM poststamps
  16. crayons
  17. hubspoke lights
  18. W-ties
  19. darts
  20. glass snow globes with monuments photos or the WLM logo inside
  21. puzzle globe from Taipei
  22. small sockpuppets

Time table

[edit]


Text for website:

[edit]
Wiki Loves Monuments

"If you seek a monument, look around (Si monumentum requiris, circumspice)"

comment: this could be a motto, or this could be just quoted in text below

(Wiki Loves Monuments is) Europe-wide monument-focused photo contest, organized by Wikimedia in September 2011.

Why are we doing this?

Cultural heritage is an important part of the knowledge Wikipedia aims to collect and share. To Wikipedia everyone can contribute also by taking pictures. A picture says a thousand words and can be useful in many different languages at the same time.

The European contest is inspired by the highly successful 2010 contest in the Netherlands, resulting in more than 12,500 freely licensed images.

Our goal is to raise awareness of monuments – both the most famous as well as the less well-known objects. Locals are sometimes unaware of monuments located in their own backyard, or on their street. They can rediscover the cultural, historical or scientific significance of their neighbourhood. Cultural heritage is around the corner - almost everywhere. Just go find it.

Who can participate and how?

Everyone can participate. All you need to do is spot a monument, take its picture, and enter it in September. Prizes are waiting on the European level as well as per participating country. The best photos in Europe will be selected from the winning photos of the various national contests. So while on vacation before September, keep our contest in mind while exploring European monuments! Any support is warmly welcomed: from a single image in the contest to spreading the word or becoming a partner.

This coming September, cultural heritage will be in the spotlight on Wikipedia from Portugal to Estonia. comment: this () means that depending if the website would have a banner with name of contest that the text in () does not have to be included in description. in other case, please use it


If you have a facebook account, join WLM on Facebook and share it with your friends: https://www.facebook.com/WikiLovesMonumients