Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/AvoinGLAM 2022

Committee feedback

Hei @Susannaanas, Tarmo, Jtuom, and Tove Ørsted:,

Thank you for your grant proposal! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Committee has made an initial review and here is our feedback:

• The proposal overall is clear, we appreciate the focus on the heritage assets held outside traditional organisations, although we are not convinced that redefining GLAM would be consensual in the movement.
• There is a coherent plan of outreach and activities, with identified ways to reach the target GLAM community.
• The expected impact of the proposal is in line with the strategic goals, with clearly defined measures of success and reasonable promises of deliverables.
• Budget-wise, we understand that the project is centered around Susanna's employment.

This is only an initial review, and before we make the final decision we would like to get more details on the following points:

1. Could you please explain your vision of collaboration with Wikimedia Suomi, particularly around Wiki Loves Monuments, as well as other projects where there is an overlap between GLAM and WMFI activities?
2. What are the future plans of AvoinGLAM? Which of the projects are one-off, and which are planned to become recurring?
3. What are you connections with the existing volunteers working on GLAM projects? In particular, what is the level of involvement internationally for the GLAM School project?
4. The proposal mentions underrepresented communities: beyond Sami where the strategy is clear, how do you intend to reach them?
5. Targets: can you please provide estimates of 2021 metrics? Number of Wikipedia articles looks particularly low, can you please provide a bit more reasoning behind this target?
6. Do we understand correctly that this is a transfer of Susanna's employment from WMFI to Open Knowledge Finland, keeping the same salary, FTE rate and benefits? If there is a change, could you please explain it?
7. New organisation: who would handle the budget management, who would Susanna report to?

We are looking forward to hearing from you, and we will make our final decision in early January upon receiving your feedback.

On behalf of the NWE regional committee — NickK (talk) 22:51, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi @NickK and the NWE regional committee,

Thank you for your response! We hope the answers we provide are satisfactory, and will be happy to discuss further.

We would like to first note that we wish to expand the focus of sharing cultural heritage openly to include the heritage assets held outside traditional organisations and the questions that arise in managing them. Rather than trying to redefine the field entirely, I (Susanna) have used the “backronym” GLobal Art & Memory as a subtle provocation to expose this gap. We are considering also adding languages: Global Languages, Art & Memory ;-)

Could you please explain your vision of collaboration with Wikimedia Suomi, particularly around Wiki Loves Monuments, as well as other projects where there is an overlap between GLAM and WMFI activities?

There will likely not be a clear-cut division, but we try to provide some insight into the differences as we see them in AvoinGLAM. We are confident that any remaining overlaps will be resolved as we work.

AvoinGLAM’s goal is to facilitate the work of cultural heritage professionals and non-professional practitioners in safeguarding and opening up cultural heritage. We look at different aspects of their challenge from their perspective, and promote the use of Wikimedia projects and open licensing in that. We also address the questions of balancing opening and protecting, and try to find solutions for that in the open ecosystem.

AvoinGLAM’s work has two distinct focus areas: the international and the local.

• AvoinGLAM works internationally trying to connect the different GLAM-related communities around shared concerns, whereas Wikimedia Finland has a strong focus and responsibility on Finland, the Finnish language, and the Finnish Wikipedia.

• In our work in Finland, we wish to address all GLAM professionals and non-professional practitioners in climbing their ladder of increasing engagement in the open ecosystem. We start small. We look for case studies that illustrate the opportunities offered by the open platforms and tools. In the future, we would like to revisit AvoinGLAM’s successful format of a “Master class” to train a generation of GLAM professionals to work independently to open up their cultural heritage assets. We can research the methods and already existing practices as well as the need for it in the “GLAM School” initiative.

Wiki Loves Monuments has not been the responsibility of Susanna anymore since 2020, and the shift was already compensated with extra resources for WLM in 2021. Wikimedia Finland has a strong interest in the competition. AvoinGLAM is likely conducting less of these established forms of engagement to prevent overlap, but is free to carry them out.

We wish to consult GLAM organizations that plan to represent their collections in Wikimedia projects and advise them on the use of open licenses. Our goal is to share the skills and transfer this knowledge to professionals, wikimedians and other cultural heritage practitioners.

The principle “nothing about us without us” encompasses how we want to work with cultural and linguistic communities, to encourage the communities to use the open ecosystem to reflect their reality as they see fit and in what language(s) they want. As language and culture are intricately intertwined, we feel that they cannot be separated. For this reason, we include working with languages in our GLAM work.

We are happy to promote Wikimedia Finland as the best partner for the Wikipedia editathons at GLAM institutions and hope that Wikimedia Finland will reciprocate on issues regarding collections data, linguistic issues, and open licensing.

We are seeing some challenges for example when a national organization wishes to engage with the local representative of GLAM or Wikidata. We will likely need to solve these case-by-case.

What are the future plans of AvoinGLAM? Which of the projects are one-off, and which are planned to become recurring?

The activities in 2022 will give us insight into how to best continue further. We aim to establish

• A vibrant and skilled GLAM community in Finland
• A connected community of GLAM practitioners internationally, across organizations and networks.

During this year we can see what structures will best support these communities to thrive. Would we need an international GLAM User Group, or maybe an Open GLAM Lab? Will the activities be split into two, the local and the international? Will AvoinGLAM seek to be officially registered, and what area would it take charge of?

The Hack4OpenGLAM hackathon is outside this application but a central part of our activities. We wish to make it recurring, and expand the scope and reach of it. It is the backbone of our engagement with different contributor communities.

We aim for continued advocacy and support in GLAM-related issues in Finland and a sustained contribution to a global GLAM network.

The GLAM School research is conducted to expose what resources are needed to strengthen GLAM work across organizational boundaries. We wish to synchronize our work with work conducted by the Language Hub and the Content Partnerships Hub, as we can see many overlaps and opportunities for fruitful collaboration.

We wish to promote experimentation and lightweight prototyping with GLAMs, and they are always carried out on a case-by-case basis. Such experiments can be refined into replicable models and distributed through the future GLAM School.

What are your connections with the existing volunteers working on GLAM projects? In particular, what is the level of involvement internationally for the GLAM School project?

Susanna has been a prominent GLAM-Wiki contributor since 2012, and is integrally involved in day-to-day activities in the GLAM-Wiki community. She is the founder and contact person for the Wikimaps User Group. She is additionally involved in the Creative Commons Global Network Council as a member of the ExCom, and she contributes to the work of the Creative Commons Open GLAM and Copyright platforms. For the most recent WikidataCon, she was one of the track curators.

Together with Kimberli Mäkäräinen, they have promoted the use of underrepresented languages across Wikimedia projects. Kimberli works with the Saami and other indigenous and minority languages closing the indigenous htgap on the Wikimedia projects and off, and Susanna shares an interest in decolonizing the institutional collections, such as correcting representation, connecting institutions and communities of origin, and protecting culturally sensitive data. Kimberli is also a member of the Wikimedia Foundation language committee, part of the Language Hub steering committee, and has actively promoted and facilitated the use of indigenous and minority languages on Wikimedia projects since 2006 and elsewhere since 1988.

Tove Ørsted and Tuomas Nolvi in the AvoinGLAM team have a long-standing commitment to opening up cultural heritage. The AvoinGLAM activities started in 2012 and have included a master class, Hack4FI cultural hackathons for Finnish memory institutions spanning from 2015 to 2020, and the publication of numerous guides.

One example of what we have done and can do can be seen through Hack4OpenGLAM, where we have been able to address the different global communities at once, and make new connections. We are especially proud of the collaboration between Creative Commons Indonesia with the Wikimedians in Nigeria in the project Public Domain Day 2022 Celebration in Nigeria. The creators made contact in the preparation of the Hack4OpenGLAM hackathon, and there are many more crossovers to report.

The GLAM School concept is not an established one, and conducting research allows us to uncover the multifaceted view of what is needed to strengthen the work with open cultural heritage from different perspectives. We have presented the idea in Wikimedia, Creative Commons and Europeana events, and we are convinced that such actions are needed. Susanna is pooling the learnings to her contributions in the Europeana Task Force on Digital Transformation, and Open Knowledge Finland’s work in the CreaTures project (and vice versa).

The proposal mentions underrepresented communities – beyond Sami where the strategy is clear, how do you intend to reach them?

On our team, Tove belongs to a linguistic minority in Finland and Kimberli to multiple underrepresented communities both in Finland and internationally, so we already have natural connections in place to multiple underrepresented communities. In addition, the work we have done to date and presented at conferences and other events has led to other underrepresented communities reaching out to us for advice.

We see this work as serving anyone who engages with underrepresented communities, and sharing best practices around that. We hope to facilitate intermediation of specific issues that need to be addressed, such as privacy, linguistic diversity, traditional knowledge, the right to be represented on their own terms, decolonization of collections data etc. When there is no best practice, but an identified problem, we wish to contribute to working on solving the issue. Our understanding of the issues stems on one hand from working with the underrepresented communities in our context. On the other hand, we are informed by discussions in the global Wikimedia and Creative Commons communities trying to tackle the issues on a policy level.

We will actively network with projects that safeguard community histories, intangible heritage, and underrepresented languages and culture. In the future, we wish to expand our work by launching hybrid, globally networked collaborations in local contexts, such as exchanges, GLAM camps, or residencies.

Targets – can you please provide estimates of 2021 metrics? Number of Wikipedia articles looks particularly low, can you please provide a bit more reasoning behind this target?

We cannot provide estimates for 2021 metrics as we were still part of Wikimedia Finland in 2021, but some of the work we have done can be seen from the AvoinGLAM Meta page, This Month in GLAM newsletters (Finland and Special stories) and Wikimedia Finland’s reports.

Since AvoinGLAM work focuses on advocacy, lightweight experiments, and the dissemination of best practices, our focus is not on the number of Wikipedia articles created or edited. Instead, we are introducing the use of Wikimedia projects to professionals in the GLAM sector, through which we expect many new contributors who may create Wikipedia articles as part of their work. This important groundlaying will affect the overall contributions of the GLAM professionals in the future, even if it is not immediately visible.

We will be happy to discuss suitable other metrics for the impactful work we do.

Do we understand correctly that this is a transfer of Susanna's employment from WMFI to Open Knowledge Finland, keeping the same salary, FTE rate and benefits? If there is a change, could you please explain it?

Yes, correct. Susanna’s salary and benefits are defined according to OKFI’s employment practices. The position will be flexible part-time with compensation based on hourly work reporting.

New organisation – who would handle the budget management, who would Susanna report to?

Susanna will be employed by OKFI since AvoinGLAM is part of Open Knowledge Finland ry (OKFI) and as of 2022, it will be the fiscal sponsor of AvoinGLAM. Susanna will report to executive director Tarmo Toikkanen, who supervises all OKFI projects. According to OKFI project practices, project managers have considerable autonomy, but projects are monitored by the executive director and ultimately the board of OKFI.

We are revising the AvoinGLAM Charter to reflect these changes.

Thank you for your consideration, and best wishes for the new year! Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 22:28, 30 December 2021 (UTC)

Funding recommendation

Hei @Susannaanas, Tarmo, Jtuom, and Tove Ørsted:,

Thank you again for your proposal and for your answers. And congratulations, your grant is approved!

The committee approved a full funding with recommendations in the amount of 54 573.17 EUR for the grant term 1 January to 31 December 2022 to AvoinGLAM.

We appreciate the experience of the Finnish GLAM-Wiki community, significant record of good work of the group becoming AvoinGLAM and a meaningful plan of activities for 2022. We also acknowledge that it is a joint initiative of Wikimedia Suomi and Open Knowledge Finland to come up with separate grant applications. The committee encourages the cooperation between the organisations, however it is our opinion that this should have been a combined proposal.

In order to make this grant impactful, the committee recommends AvoinGLAM do the following:

1. Please come up with a clear division of roles/scopes between AvoinGLAM and Wikimedia Suomi. We are open to your suggestions on what form it should take, various options are possible from incorporation in strategies of your respective organisations to appointment of contact persons between the two organisations. The main idea is avoiding situations where two organisations are contacting the same partner without coordination (e.g. AvoinGLAM contacts a local library to digitise heritage and Wikimedia Suomi contacts it for a Wiki Loves Monuments partnership).
2. Please coordinate the GLAM School project with GLAM-Wiki initiatives internationally. This project seems to be an interesting innovative experiment with good impact potential, thus we are happy to fund it. However, once the ‘school year’ is over, there should be an easy way for participants to continue GLAM-Wiki contributions: make sure GLAM groups of respective language / country affiliates have the capacity to support them, or agree with international groups or hubs that can support them. The approval of this grant does not guarantee future funding of, for example, a potential international GLAM User Group.

Kindly let us know if these recommendations seem realistic and make sense for you (with the AvoinGLAM/WMFI part ideally expected in the first half of the year). We can discuss them in more detail if requested.

Thank you again for your proposal and for your involvement and we wish you a successful and impactful work!

On behalf of the NWE regional committee — NickK (talk) 15:24, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for supporting the initiative! We will be in contact about the recommendations as soon as possible.

Best regards, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 🦜 15:39, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you from me too! -Yupik (talk) 20:01, 12 January 2022 (UTC)