Wikimedia CH/Grant apply/GLAMhack25

Infodata

• Name of the project: GLAMhack 2025
• Amount requested: CHF 10'000
• Type of grantee: Organization (Opendata.ch Association)
• Name of the contact: annasigrist
• Contact: anna.sigristopendata.ch

In case of questions, please write to grantwikimedia.ch

The problem and the context

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

• With our annual GLAMhack, we systematically tap into the latent and unused potential among Swiss heritage institutions to open up their data and content, to improve the access to them, to encourage participation, to actively engage with relevant stakeholders, and to foster the reuse of heritage data and content.
• With our annual GLAMhack, we tap into the unused potential for collaboration between institutions and encourage heritage institutions and institutions of higher education to intensify cross-sector collaboration.
• With our annual GLAMhack, and by means of our Open GLAM working group, we systematically cut through competitive tendencies in the GLAM field and help institutions to overcome organizational silos and to engage in collaborative online projects with an international scope.
• By means of our annual GLAMhack, we promote the creation of projects that create new opportunities for a broader public to enjoy collections and the knowledge of GLAM institutions.
• Related collections/objects are often split apart and distributed among various institutions; by means of our annual GLAMhack we encourage institutions and their users to reconnect (at least virtually) what belongs together.
• While individually (often illegally) collected objects could be seen as the property of certain institutions, they do ultimately belong to the public that often has, if at all, only a very limited opportunity to access those objects. Over the past years, the GLAMhack has become instrumental in exploring in more depth the challenges surrounding collections with a colonial past and to reflect on the adequate balancing of sometimes contradictory stakeholder interests (e.g. the call for unlimited open access to collections vs. collective interests of the communities concerned by the artifacts).

What is your solution to this problem (please explain the context and the solution)?

• One of the GLAMhacks' main competencies is connecting researchers, designers, Wikimedians, and coders, creating a vast opportunity to network and collaborate closely over the course of 2-3 days during the GLAMhack.
• This creates a starting point for new collaborations going beyond the hackathon and in general contributes to a culture of collaboration in the GLAM field.
• GLAMhack also aims to proliferate the projects through our own networks and our ever-growing international community.
• Our dataset team, constituted by Lionel Walter, Jonas Lendemann, Pierre-Louis Blanchard, Christian Erlinger and Dominik Sievi approaches dozens of institutions continuously in order to encourage and support them in the process of opening datasets. Those datasets can be found here http://make.opendata.ch/wiki/data:glam_ch (the ones marked with a star are this year’s additions).
• Opendata.ch and a large, well connected and active community has effectively been pushing the agenda of unified and accessible collections and objects for more than 10 years.
• By adhering to the OpenGLAM Principles, taking also into account the CARE principles of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance, institutions and participants work towards a fair, open, inclusive, and transparent community and allow a broad public to access objects and information around those objects and facilitate participation around cultural heritage. This means for instance that the communities from which the objects originate get a chance to (re)connect with those objects and enrich them with local knowledge and experiences (see e.g. specifically the CultureFLOW Project https://opendata.ch/de/events/open-glam-night/#cultureflow).

Project goals

• The GLAMhack 2025 takes place in collaboration with Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte (SKKG) in Winterthur in November 2025
• 60-100 active participants
• 10-15 projects worked on during the GLAMhack
• 5 projects developed during the hackathon are further promoted and are presented to a wider public or are otherwise put to some outside use (e.g. in research).
• 230 open datasets/collections from 90 institutions made available through the make.opendata.ch website.
• Make the datasets available through opendata.swiss and the European Data Portal.
• 15% of the datasets / collections are available as linked open data / accessible through a IIIF-compliant API.
• Make all open collections from Switzerland available on Wikimedia Commons (where this makes sense from the point of view of the Wikipedia /Wikimedia Community).
• Eventually reference all open collections from Switzerland on Europeana.
• Reach the same level of satisfaction regarding networking, and getting new inspirations or ideas as in previous years.
• Approach 50 data owners directly in view of the hackathon.
• Get providers of content platforms to reach out to data providers in view of the hackathon.
• Media coverage in 2 daily or weekly newspapers as well as on blogs.

Project impact

How will you know if you have met your goals?

Some goals, like the number of datasets, institutions and participants as well as the number of projects are easily metrically tracked. We track each hackathon with an M&E process and also send out a feedback survey to all participants following the hackathon. In the month after the event, we hold a debriefing session with partners, participants and the organisation committee to discuss successes and identify areas for improvement based on the goals we have set ourselves. For further information, please see our documentation page of past hackathons (https://glam.opendata.ch/hackathons/) for metrics and evaluations. The final report for last year’s hackathon (GLAMhack23) can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-R8GanHdftZRvGjzFxaJR2TwMglHWGkV/view.

An overview of individual hackathon projects is provided on the respective hackathon pages (see e.g. https://hack.glam.opendata.ch/event/12 for the GLAMhack24). A large proportion of them typically use data from Wikidata and/or content from Wikimedia Commons.

Do you have any goals or metrics around participation or content?

Yes - an average of 75 participants took part in our past GLAMhack editions, which means our goal in terms of participation has consistently been met. By reaching this number of participants in past years, we can also confidently say that at least 10-14 projects will be worked on. Furthermore, we have a significant number of first-time participants each year (see also “Community engagement” below).

Project plan

Activities

Each year we create a diverse and engaging event with side events and warm-up opportunities, including workshops, presentations, brainstorming and warm-up activities in the premath of the event. For the GLAMhack 2025, we will do this in collaboration with the SKKG. During the main hackathon event, activities mostly involve presentations and pitches, team finding, working on the prototypes and using their data sets.

Budget

Below is a tentative budget for the GLAMhack 2025:

Budgeted expenses GLAMhack 2025

Label	Amount	Description / calculation basis
Food & beverages	CHF 11'500	2x breakfast, 2x lunch, 1x dinner, 1x final apero for 80 participants
Accommodation	CHF 10'000	2 nights for 60 participants, CHF 80/night
Project coordination and communication	CHF 15'000	200 hours at CHF 75 (OpenGLAM CH)
Opendata.ch (10% of overall budget)	CHF 6'000	10% of overall budget for all hackathons under the umbrella of Opendata.ch (https://opendata.ch/)
Hack tech infrastructure	CHF 2'800	Hacking platform, datasets hosting, ...
Side events	CHF 4'000	Events happening before the GLAMhack to promote the hackathon
Public relations and communication materials	CHF 2'500	Logo, flyers, video teasers, ...
Onsite tech support	CHF 2'700	Boosting internet connection, ...
Gifts	CHF 500	Thank you gifts for 10 organizers, CHF 50/gift
Varia / incidentals	CHF 5'000
TOTAL Expenses	CHF 60'000

Budgeted revenues GLAMhack 2025

Source of Revenue / Sponsor	Amount (to be) requested	Comments
Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte (SKKG)	CHF 15'000
Friends of OpenGLAM	CHF 2'000	See https://opendata.ch/projects/openglam-working-group/
Wikimedia CH	CHF 10'000
Stiftung Corymbo	CHF 10'000
Stadt Winterthur	CHF 10'000
Other revenues to be defined	CHF 13'000
TOTAL Revenues	CHF 60'000

Community engagement

The Swiss OpenGLAM Community is alive and growing, as can be seen by the significant ratio of new participants in each year’s GLAMhack edition. In the 2024 edition, 55% of all participants were joining the GLAMhack for the first time.

Furthermore, OpenGLAM (together with the Open Event Data Working Group) produces a quarterly newsletter and is well-connected with various GLAM institutions, many of whom are also involved in the GLAM-Wiki community (please refer to https://opendata.ch/projects/openglam-working-group/). The GLAM community is also intertwined with the Opendata.ch Community and the international Open Knowledge Community.