Grants:TPS/LauraHale/Amsterdam GLAMCamp/Report

Event name:

Description of your participation: I was one of the major participants during two sessions:

• Communication with diverse groups (education, women's, sport, GLBT, language minorities) (Etherpad)
• The future of 'This Month in GLAM' (Etherpad)

I networked with several female participants, and a conference will be held in May in Argentina based on this networking and the conversations had here, with GLAM being a component of the conference. I had multiple conversations with about an incentive program we hope to launch soon, about metrics useful for GLAM, how Australia is using the GLAM newsletter, and about using Spoken Word Wikipedia to improve disability access on Wikipedia. I had extensive interaction with people from WM-UK, WM-Chile, WM-NL, and WM-DE. I learned more about work being done on Wikinews and how that can be incorporated into our own work in Australia. I found people developing metric tools that may be useful for us, and discussed with developers including some one from WM-CZ about what we used and why our stakeholders appreciated these stats.

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events? Room for improvement:

• Price point is a major issue for people coming from abroad who have to pay their own costs out of pocket with out those costs being recouped through grants. The after the main conference events were awesome, but 20 to 45 euros to participate was a big problem. There were not multiple price points for places to stay, and felt like a lack of awareness that people coming from great distances may need time to adjust to these differences.
• Planning where participants need to be in the know needs to be largely complete before participants arrive. I don't recall information being provided about SIM cards until I was in the air and unable to get my phone unlocked in response to the information.
• Organisers need to make more clear what the guidelines were for getting grants offered by organisers. Criteria were unclear and this caused some friction.
• When organisers are communicating with GLAMs that participants are involved with, the organisers need to be supportive of the attendees. This caused local friction during the scholarship process.

What went well:

• Diversity of participants was great. People had different cultural experiences that made wider application easier across that diverse audience.
• Participants were enthusiastic and generally happy to be there.
• Creation of support networks happened.
• There were a lot of interesting presentations.
• There was a great deal of knowledge sharing about Wiki Loves Monuments. It looks other countries will participate and it will expand beyond Europe.
• There has been a great of follow up in response to discussions on multiple locations including IRC, mailing lists and on the GLAM newsletter. This is invaluable because it is something that can be shown to GLAM stakeholders and helps justify the time commitment by showing clear outcomes.
• I had opportunities to talk about the work I was doing on a one-on-one level.

Documentation of sharing about this on my part:

• on my blog
• Tweets during the event
• Australian GLAM newsletter
• WM-AU Committee mailing list, WM-AU member list
• E-mail and in person conversations with people involved with my GLAM

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation? I helped with diversified participation by talking up how my chapter is reaching out by asking: How can WMF tools help you meet your goals? By phrasing it this way, participants have a greater buy in, which will lead to more extensive contributions. Beyond that, I worked on diversified participation by discussing how we tried to engage people with disabilities involved with WMF projects, and how we targeted female oriented content as part of our GLAM work. Related to that, File:GLAM for Mil Hist.pdf got extensive feedback, and will likely be to translated into at least one to three languages as a result of contacts made at the conference.

Detail of expenditures:

• E-mail sent with receipt for AUD 1578.48 (round-trip flight).

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency): 171.52 AUD