Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Österreich/October 2012

Vienna office

In October the new managaing director Claudia Garad took up employment. Initially she operates from the "HUB Vienna" (http://vienna.the-hub.net/) a coworking space for a diverse community of entrepreneurs, impact professionals, creatives, innovators, dedicated to driving sustainable change. Her first task is to look for a suitable office space and establish the WMAT office in Vienna. In addtion, she is responsible for the organisation of the general assembly in Linz in December and supports the board with the annual accounts and the FDC process for the 2013 budget. Her routine business is further defined within WMAT's strategic 3 years plan: http://mitglieder.wikimedia.at/Projekte/Zukunft.

The main responsibilities are:

Association - infrastructure, ressources, organisational processes
International Relations - international projects, cooperation with other chapters, Wikimedia Foundation
Community - promote content, community building
External Affaires - lobbying, GLAM etc.

Fundraising Kongress Vienna

The Fundraising Verband Austria FVA is a network for fundraising, resource mobilisation and philanthropy. The association supports its members to build skills, knowledge and promote excellence within civil society. WMAT is part of the network in order to adapt competencies and skills for recruiting volunteers and exploiting alternative funding methods. The annual fundraising conference is a platform for networking and mutual learning which provides a good overview of recent trends and developments. Claudia Garad, managing director, represented WMAT during the conference and gathered valuable contacts, ideas and information.

http://www.fundraising.at

http://www.fundraisingkongress.at

Pioneers' Festival Vienna

The Pioneers' Festival in Vienna is a three-day technology event in October where 2500 start-ups, bloggers, investors and people from all over Europe come together to discuss the most recent technology trends — web, mobile, and IT-scenes. The "HUB Vienna", at that time the office of WMAT's managing director Claudia Garad, was partner of the festival and hosted a side event - the start-up brunch "Technology for Social Innovation" with about 30 attendees. This provided a very good opportunity for the new managing director to give a talk and present the various Wikimedia Austria activities and projects to an interested audience.

http://pioneersfestival.com/agenda/

Landtag Project

Each Austrian state has an elected legislature, the Landtag, a state government, the Landesregierung, and a governor, the Landeshauptmann.

In 2009, German Wikipedia started the Landtag Projects in Niedersachsen, Germany. Goal of the project is to improve the Wikipedia articles describing the members of Landtag and Landesregierung in a state. Although every Landtag member has an article, there are only few of them with suitable photographs. Within the projects, teams of professionally working voluntary photographers and Wikipedia authors visit the Landtag in order to take photographs of the politicians under a free license and to answer questions on generating, collecting and spreading free knowledge.

In October 2012 the first Austrian Landtag Project took place in the Salzburg Landtag. During the Landtag session every member had the opportunity to come to the Wikipedia area where pictures were taken by the voluteers with a professional studio equipment and questions on license issues were answered. 35 out of 43 members of Landtag and Landesregierung were photographed by a team of eight volunteers in one day.

During the project some of the members could take photographs of Hangar-7, the museum of Red Bull founder Dietrich Matschitz and the ORF State Studio. In the following days, the Austrian monument project could also be continued with photographs of hundreds of monuments in the state of Salzburg.

Photographs and more information (in German): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Landtagsprojekt/Salzburg/Ergebnisse

Wikimeet Innsbruck

There are several regular Wikipedia meet ups in Germany, Swizerland and Austria. The most recent one was established September 2012 in Innbruck, as the closest meet-up for the community in Tyrol was approximately 2.5 hours far away (Munich).

Therefore, also as a result of the WikiCon 2012, a group of five people decided to found such a regular meeting in Innsbruck. People in Tyrol should not have to travel that far in order to meet other people working for free knowledge.

Integrating also other Wikipedians into this idea, at least 5 people are coming to every monthly meet up. Hopefully this will also contribute to the project with the biology institute of the University of Innsbruck.

As there had already been meet ups of people from Open Street Map together with the Linux User Group Tyrol, it would be also nice to cooperate with them. There are many great ideas where parties could benefit from each other.