AvoinGLAM/Annual plan 2023

This is an emerging page for the Annual plan of AvoinGLAM for 2023. It lists interest areas and initiatives that could be brought further. Through discussions and planning we will focus and formalize this into the Annual plan.

Background

GLAM

We believe in the strong global community working for the benefit of open access to cultural heritage. The network extends from wikimedians working with cultural heritage to contributors in other open knowledge organizations, culture professionals, content communities, and finally to anyone sharing interest in cultural heritage.

The acronym GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) has been used to successfully highlight the efforts to open up cultural heritage held by institutions. In addition to this, we wish to broaden the horizon beyond the organizational perspective into heritage that is not contained within the walls of the institutions: intangible heritage, languages, contested topics, or the undocumented heritage of individuals, groups and communities. Our version of the acronym reads as Global Languages, Art & Memory.

GLAM is also a collection of initiatives that contribute to the common goal. Globally, the Creative Commons Open Culture program is spearheading these topics at the moment with their Open Culture program. In the Wikimedia movement, thematic hubs are forming, with the Content partnership hub at Wikimedia Sweden taking charge of several issues within GLAM-Wiki, such as capacity building for content uploads and partnerships with GLAM institutions. In addition to these, there are other networks and events that same the same ethos.

L for Languages, Literature, Letters, and Libraries

AvoinGLAM does not have a strategy around working with libraries. However, we work with several related aspects: Wikidata and knowledge management, metadata, the Saami language project... At some point we may wish to streamline these. We will currently not create a slot or a category to fill with activities, but rather be responsive to emerging topics and cluster them, when needed.

AvoinGLAM governance

AvoinGLAM has existed for a decade, being a loosely defined working group at Open Knowledge Finland. In 2021, we experimented with an arrangement of coordinating GLAM activities between Wikimedia Finland, Open Knowledge Finland and Creative Commons Finland through AvoinGLAM. For 2022, AvoinGLAM was re-established as a more independent entity, receiving Wikimedia community funding for our activities with Open Knowledge Finland as fiscal sponsor. This arrangement is beneficial for AvoinGLAM in the sense that the group can focus more on actual activities whereas much of the administration can be handed over to OKFI. However, the downside is that we are dependent on the management choices of OKFI, we cannot represent ourselves independently of incorporated entities such OKFI, or in some cases, Wikimedia Finland. To establish ourselves as an entity seeking funding from governmental bodies, we need a record of at least two fiscal years. We will monitor the development of the opportunities of being incorporated, but we will not progress yet.

Our second concern is our role in the Wikimedia movement. Establishing the group as a user group would benefit us a lot. In our current state, we are not considered for participating in movement events or decision-making processes. For this reason, we are going to go forward with applying for a user group status.

Projects

Hack4OpenGLAM and experimentation

Hack4OpenGLAM has been our spearhead initiative to establish a creative collaborative event in the Open GLAM movement. The event was arranged in 2020 and 2021 as a side event of the Creative Commons Summit. As the 2022 CC Summit was postponed or cancelled, it left us in a situation where we need to rethink how the event will be reshaped for the post-Covid era.

Hack4OpenGLAM serves many purposes. For one, and maybe the most important, it is a wonderful way of bringing together a group of likeminded people to learn from one another and to do and try out things together, and to celebrate. We can join with other similar events in gathering best practices around facilitation of collaborative creative work.

Secondly, it promotes and showcases innovation and reuse of the open content that we are producing. The format is not serving this goal as well, and for that reason, we should investigate also other formats. They could be different configurations of collaborations across the community, funded experiments, or novel collaboration formats, for example. We could contribute to incubator activities.

To take the next steps, we will explore how to combine in-person and online or local and global events. In Finland, we will present the outcomes of Hack4OpenGLAM for the GLAM sector in order to start processing together how to bring creative collaborative work into their activities in the best possible way.

Globally, we will work more tightly with other ongoing initiatives in the OpenGLAM domain to possibly run several local/regional events in coordination.

Wikidocumentaries as a collaboration platform

Wikidocumentaries is a project that displays open content from the Wikimedia projects and combines it with open content from other repositories. The project acts on one hand as a visual interface to Wikimedia content but also as a multifaceted contribution platform, once it is developed further. Thanks to the structured data of Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and the APIs of several cultural heritage projects around the world, it is possible to search and draw images and other media, data and textual information from the linked projects and allow the users to work with them, simply by verifying and importing the data to Wikimedia projects, or composing their Wikidocumentaries from the materials. The project has been initiated at Open Knowledge Finland by Susanna Ånäs and the team in 2018, and AvoinGLAM will pick up the development.

We will focus on making Wikidocumentaries a central platform through which it will be possible to contribute to the Wiki Loves contests. Through collaborations, we will establish novel ways to display the data as data visualizations and on maps.

Focus areas

Capacity building in GLAM globally

Our 2022 project GLAM School informs us about the needs of the global GLAM community, with input from outside the Wikimedia movement. We wish to disseminate these learning through a variety of channels.

Creative Commons runs volunteer working groups that tackle the most burning aspects of open sharing, and produce tangible outcomes of this work. Starting in 2022, Susanna is part of the Expert Committee at the Content Partnership Hub Helpdesk, which can propose many ways in which to turn capacity challenges into knowledge sharing. In 2022, Susanna was part of the Europeana Digital Transformation Task Force. The learning as well as the output of the combined interviews of GLAM School and other needs assessments put together can inform the creation of shared resources for the global GLAM community.

Local community

We recognize that we need expand our network in Finland. We think that the most important ones to connect with would be the students in related fields: media, design, and digital humanities. We should also come together with the mapping communities to explore those approaches in our projects. On one hand, we should strengthen our ties with the professional GLAM networks and associations, including the GLAM juridical group. We also need to do a lot of advocacy around open licenses with contemporary artists and creators to not be placed needlessly on opposite sides in legislation changes.

We aim to let go of the coordinator role regarding juridical advocacy in GLAM in Finland, but try to network more in the area. Instead, we can keep our focus on bringing new questions to the attention of the local and global networks.

Visual literacy

We are considering collaborating with initiatives looking into combating visual disinformation. On the basic level, we simply advocate for visual knowledge, and manifest it through the development of Wikidocumentaries, the use of data visualizations, as well as engaging in discussions and highlighting these issues in webinars. On a more advanced level, we might engage in experimentations exploring this space, for example about using historical imagery for producing deep fakes about historical events.

Small history, knowledge gaps, knowledge equity

Our agenda highlights undocumented histories. We might not have the capacity in 2023 to embark on development projects, but an idea has been to provide tools for community archiving in the form of a community playbook. It could be a collection of tools and methods that would allow small heritage projects to start archiving in ways that would make it easy to incorporate their materials in the connected landscape of open digital heritage. Configuring Wikibase for these purposes would be an ideal option. We are welcoming collaboration proposals in this area.

Thematically, this area also includes issues of multilinguality and notability in Wikimedia projects. Wikidocumentaries can bring different sources together in multiple languages, thus circumventing the notability criteria of the single projects. It can also be developed to display more multimodal information, including maps, videos, sound and for example Wikisource texts and scans.

Ethical sharing

To facilitate sharing information that is more private, belongs to smaller communities or that is contested, we must explore safe and ethical sharing practices. Not everything can be shared, but not opening at all is not the ideal solution, otherwise we might risk losing the historical track of those communities. We must develop legislation, legal tools, ethical frameworks and best practices that advance consensual sharing of certain types of relatively sensitive information, for example indigenous, traditional knowledge or private information, that could either be completely blocked or open without restrictions. These practices should be extended to Wikimedia projects as well. We hope to advance constructive and fruitful discussion between the proponents of the extremes in their positions.

Emerging topics

We look for impactful topics that sprout from the existing emphasis. In 2022, we started looking into how open knowledge contributors can work in relation to crises, and build a community around that. As a counterpart to that, we would like to explore mechanisms that promote resurgence, and the sustainability of people, knowledge, environment, and the creations.

Budget

Basic

• Coordinator (up to 1.0 FTE, Wikidocumentaries and Hack4OpenGLAM included)
• Global participation for the AvoinGLAM community (travel)
• Office supplies
• Local event organizing costs
• Administration
• Services

Projects

• Wikidocumentaries – developer (part-time)
• Hack4OpenGLAM – event organization costs

Activities

• Community events
  • Webinars
  • Meetups
• Participation & representation
  • Consultations, working groups, community events
• Outreach
  • Communications and material production
  • Workshops (in-person, online)
• Collaborations
  • Saami
  • Dataviz
  • Intangible heritage
  • Visual literacy something
• Projects
  • Wikidocumentaries
  • Hack4OpenGLAM

Starfish retrospective of the first half of 2022

• AvoinGLAM in 2023