CEE/Newsletter/October 2017/Contents/From the team

From the team

It all started with a casual observation...

The observation of the gradually increasing interest of CEE communities to publish news and success stories in the monthly newsletters "This Month in GLAM" and "This Month in Education". In the last year, more CEE countries more often have prepared materials for the two newsletters and got visibility in front of the Wiki Education and GLAM audiences. Probably this is an indicator that we, as a region, have even more stories to share – between us and with the world – in all other areas of our Wikimedian work.

Thus, one of the outcomes of the Wikimedia CEE Meeting in Warsaw this September was the idea of establishment of this CEE Newsletter. Partners in this crime are (alphabetically) Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska (Poland), Nat Tymkiv (Ukraine), Tomasz Ganicz (Poland), Kaarel Vaidla (Estonia) and Vassia Atanassova (Bulgaria), with the moral support of the attending WMF staffers Christel Steigenberger, Kalliope Tsouroupidou and Vahid Masrour, and of course, the members of the Wikimedia Cuteness Association, Wozzy and Cancunchyk.

The CEE Newsletter can help us collect in a more consistent, reachable, reusable way stories and good practices developed in the region. It can keep us informed of our ongoing initiatives and be a valuable venue for publicity and reporting purposes, not only in the areas of GLAM and education, but also other institutional collaborations, contests and challenges, wiki expeditions, editathons and other live events, important milestones and anniversaries, notable media appearances, gender gap activities, trainings, software tools developed in the CEE region, tips for useful and reusable Wikidata queries, and many more.

To make the maintenance a bit easier, the CEE Newsletter can feature all the materials submitted to both the GLAM and Educational newsletter, thus serving yet another target group on a minimal additional cost of effort and time. :)

It also aims to contain the stories that the local CEE volunteers and media relations staffers can provided as materials for publication by the 20th of the month. This makes the newsletter a place for practicing storytelling and reporting skills, i.e. a tool valuable in its own way.

The editorial team (currently of 5 and welcoming new members) will be responsible for maintaining the overall consistent look and feel of the newsletter and reaching out to potential authors from the region. Among the ideas discussed so far are the "Featured country / language", as well as translation of the the newsletter articles to other languages.

Feel welcome to contribute to the CEE Newsletter! Make sure we cover what matters to you! :)

Editorial note

The CEE Newsletter uses adapted templates from the "This Month in GLAM" newsletter hosted in Outreach Wiki. Due to certain differences in the approach, some of the templates here may not work in the same way. Manual support may be needed and the templates may not work automagically (yet). If your written material in the Newsroom does not appear in the contents (or if it appears messy), leave us a note on the talk page Talk:CEE/Newsletter, on the editors' talk pages, via email or in social media.

If you are good in programming templates, in proofreading, translating, or in writing or finding interesting stories from CEE, do not hesitate to join us in improving the editorial process in both the technical and the content issues. :)