Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Österreich/November 2012

Vienna office

WMAT decided to rent an office in Vienna, the premises are in Siebensterngasse 25 in the vibrant seventh municipal district, a hotspot for media, creative industry and start-ups. The facilities will serve as an office for WMAT staff and open space office and meeting venue for Wikimedians and Wikipedians from Austria an international visitors. There's is a working area with desks for two employees and a conference aera for meetings which can also be converted into a temporary working aera. A kitchenette provides the infrastructure to cater meetings and workshops up to ten people. While the furnishing is almost complete, the technical infrastructure has not been completely installed yet. The first meeting in the new premises took place on November 19 - a workshop to prepare issues concerning the general assembly in December.

http://mitglieder.wikimedia.at/Gesch%C3%A4ftsstelle

Wikidata presentation Vienna

Lydia Pintscher from Wikimedia Germany's WikiData team visited Vienna for a conference and offered to use this opportunity to give a talk about WikiData for interested Wikipedians in Vienna. About twelve community and staff members of WMAT gathered on November 13 at 6 p.m. to listen to Lydia's presentation and discuss first ideas for Austrian contributions to the project. The offcial two hour event was followed by further informal discussions in the local pub.

Wiki Loves Monuments award presentation ceremony

A little less than a year ago, volunteers from all over the world started working on the 2012 edition of Wiki Loves Monuments – the largest photo competition in the world. More than 350,000 images have been submitted by over 15,000 people for the 2012 competition in countries all over the world. For Austria the 2012 contest was the second edition and resulted in 10.800 photographs of castles, palaces, chruches, industrial memorials and other listed memorials. This year, more photographers from the general public and townships participated and contributed pictures with with an amazingly vast variety of persepectives on Autria's cultural heritage.

The award presentation took place on November 16, in the Vienna Hofburg and was hosted by WMAT's cooperation partner the Bundesdenkmalamt, who were also represented in the jury. The photo that received the highest ranking by our national jury is a photo of the Pottendorf castle ruin with chapel by user Becky85. The winner was awarded with a photo equipment by Canon. The other awardees obtained balloon rides across the Alps, hotel vouchers and valuable illustrated books sponsored by the Bundesdenkmalamt.

We are also happy to announce, that one Austrian contribution made it to the top 15 photographs of the international contest: The Crypt of the baroque Altenburg Abbey in Lower Austria with mural paintings by students of Paul Troger. The buildings and the paintings of the monastery were renovated and restored in the 1950s and 1960s. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Altenburg_%283%29.JPG

Further information:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012_in_Austria

http://wikilovesmonuments.at

Wiki Loves Public Art

By definition, thousands of sculptures, mosaics, mural paintings, memorials and installations in public space cannot be covered by Wiki Loves Monuments. However, the fact that they are not officially protected monuments doesn't mean that they are not appreciable. In most cases, it is not a problem to photgraph and upload them on Wikimedia Commons. Therefore, WMAT will start a photo contest in March 2012 in order to promote more uploads on Commons. In preparation an according leaflet was distributed during the Wiki Loves Monuments award presentation in November and a website with further information established. Our staff member Ruben Demus also contributed an alternative design for the logo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki_Loves_Public_Art_2013.

WMATs project website: http://wikilovespublicart.at/

LinuxDay

The annual LinuxDay in Dornbirn (http://linuxday.at) is organized by the Linux User Group Vorarlberg. There, in the most western federal state of Austria, close to the Lake of Constance is the border triangle of Austria, Germany and Swizerland.

In 2011 our first outreach activity to a broader public was having a booth at the LinuxDay 2011. We had chosen to participate due to the low costs, interested volunteers nearby and to test how we could do outreach. The focus was on the general Wikimedia idea, in contrast to being Wikipedia-centric as earlier volunteer events had been. As we have reported back then the event was successful.

Two side-notes in retrospective:

We found our most important partner for WikiCon 2012 there, the

University of Vorarlberg (FHV).

Due to the success of LinuxDay 2011 and the international outreach in

the German-speaking area it had, we brought together the three German-speaking chapters to have a joint booth at Europe's leading Open Source event (See the report about LinuxTag 2012).

So in 2012 it was logical for us to participate in this event again. Three volunteers came to Dornbirn and manned a booth. It was adjacent to the Public Domain project which digitalizes old records (under public domain) and put them online. They have also received funding for a laser record player from Wikimedia Deutschland. We gave a presentation on the Wikimedia projects which was attended by approx. 50 persons, we used this opportunity to introduce the annual fundraiser of the WMF and the new projects Wikidata and WikiVoyage.

The result was good but not as good as last year, simply because last year had an impact already so it was hard to improve a lot. In the debriefing the team agreed that we won't participate in 2013 but will look for either a) bigger or b) events on different topics to increase our outreach.

Denkmalmesse Leipzig

From 22 to 24 November 2012, the "denkmal 2012" - a combination of trade fair, specialist programme, practical demonstrations, award ceremonies and special presentations - took place in Leipzig (http://www.denkmal-leipzig.de/LeMMon/denkmal_web_eng.nsf/). The winners of Wiki Loves Monuments in Germany were presented there and there was a Wiki Loves Monuments information booth hosted by volunteers from Austria, Germany, Slovakia and South Tyrol. WMAT covered the travel costs for three Austrian and one Slowakian community member (accommodation was paid by WMDE). In return WMAT could establish important contacts with representatives of heritage conservation organisations, especially from Central and Eastern Europe, which might valuable for future projects and cooperation. WMATs successful cooperation with the Bundesdenkmalamt (Agency responsible for Austrian Monuments) once again proved to be an important door opener. Last but not least, the event contributed to inform an interested audience in genereal and many experts in particular on how Wikipedia and Wikimedia can contribute to heritage conservation in the digital era.

More pictures and videos: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012/Deutschland/Denkmalmesse_Leipzig

There is also a blog post from User:Karl Gruber in German on wp:kurier: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kurier

Cooperation Austrian Academy of Sciences

End of November Beppo Stuhl, member of the WMAT board, and Claudia Garad, WMAT managing director, had a first meeting with Ms. Wandl-Vogt from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in order to evaluate possibilities of cooperation and joint projects. Some first ideas were discussed, e.g. a national contest called "Wiki Loves Plants" (working title) aimed at collecting pictures and typical Austrian designations of domestic plants. A workshop in February 2013 with respresentatives of WMAT and the Austrian Academy of Scienes, Academia and the National Museum of Natural History to elaborate the ideas will be the next step.