Witty’s Blog

If you are a GLAM looking to make your photographic collection more widely available online, for the last couple of years your first choice would have been to head over to “Flickr Commons”. And you would be in good company too.

However, at least for the current year, Flickr Commons is officially full:

Following a flurry of tweets - led by Mia Ridge who put out a blogpost on this topic much faster than me :-)  - May I take this opportunity then to extend an offer to all of those in “the current backlog” that Wikimedia Commons is open for business - and with a couple of new tricks up our sleeve too.

1) Disk space on the image servers has been dramatically increased very recently. It was getting pretty close to the limit for a while and some MAJOR content donations had to be put on hold whilst that was sorted out. They’ll be announced shortly and I’m really looking forward to it (hint: it’s those Dutch again!) I can’t think of a pretty picture to illustrate this point so I’ll point you to the page that wins my personal “the thing that is quite clearly important but I’m not really sure what it means, award” - http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/

2) The Multimedia Usability project is coming along nicely. Whilst I must admit the Wikimedia upload interface is not as shiny and friendly as the Flickr one, we’re doing our level best to make it easier and cleaner. One of the bigger headaches in improving Wikimedia Commons uploading is that Wikimedia only allows “free content” which means that the upload form is currently half international copyright crash-course and half upload-interface. The plus side of this is that you can be sure as a user of Wikimedia Commons that everything there has had it’s copyright checking done for you. None of this “contact us if you would like to use the image” stuff, everything is available to use and re-use. Flickr, of course, offers a much broader range of potential copyright licenses - including non-commercial and all-rights-reserved. However, in Flickr Commons a GLAM is only allowed to use the “no known copyright restrictions” tag which means that all content in Flickr Commons is already approved by the providing institution to be used in Wikimedia Commons anyway.

3) No ads, no corporation, no commercial motivation. OK, so this one isn’t exactly new, but it’s worth reiterating. Since 2005 Flickr has been owned by one of the internet’s giant commercial enterprises - Yahoo!. Flickr Commons sits at the more altruistic end of the spectrum of their activities but the fact that Flickr is owned and operated by a US commercial entity no-doubt features as a potential risk in GLAMs meetings to assess whether to join the project (especially so for publicly-funded GLAMs outside of the US where there can be rules about domestically-sourced partners etc.). Of course where I’m going with this is that Wikimedia projects are all completely ad-free, run by a charity, charge no fees for usage, require no log-ins or personal information etc. etc. The flip-side of this is that, as a corporation, Flickr can choose to take down images if the uploader says so, the Wikimedia Foundation can’t. I’ve heard that some GLAMs have been reticent to upload to Wikimedia Commons out of the fear that they can’t delete them later if they change their mind.

4) Contextualisation. The most obvious difference between Flickr and Wikimedia Commons is that Flickr is a website for photographs to be seen in-and-of-themselves whereas on Wikimedia the images are (at least ostensibly) intended to be used in an encyclopedia. Of course there’s no obligation that an image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons would ever be used in a Wikipedia article but that is the general idea. Flickr is good for discussing photograhy as an artform in dialogical fashion (a very valid activity - don’t get me wrong) and the audience there is allowed to curate galleries quite easily. On the other hand Wikimedia Commons is good for being able to take a more curatorial approach - to embed the images in an educational context where the cultural significance of the subject/medium/author etc. can be elaborated. Both are useful things but Flickr can be a bit of an ‘echo chamber’ - especially when it’s an image of a collection item.

5) Usage checking. If you look down the bottom of the page for any image in Wikimedia Commons you will be able to see a section entitled “File Usage on Other Wikis”. This global checker is relatively new and enables you to see just how and where any individual image is being contextualised in articles across all the different language editions of Wikipedia. For example, check the usage of this image of former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (donated to Wikimedia by the German Federal Archives). You can see that it is used in three articles in the English edition but also two articles in Hebrew, two in Arabic, etc. etc. That’s the kind of statistical usage-proof that makes for great executive summaries to management.

5.1) Usage Checking - categories! This one is really new. Not only can you look up the stats for an individual image but now you can do it for a whole category using the “GLAMerous tool” by Magnus Manske. Try one of the “popular groups” to give it a go. This tool will aggregate the usage statistics for any category - most especially things like “category:images from xyz museum”. This lets you see in short order the combined multimedia contribution and usage of any GLAM on Wikipedia. Very nice!

Ultimately, they’re related projects with similar aims - the publication of GLAM multimedia content to a wider audience - but they go about their work in deliberately different ways. 2010 will no doubt prove to be an interesting year for multimedia in Wikimedia projects.

[update: Mia's blogpost about this topic now includes a collection of the tweet replies she received to the question "has anyone done audience research into why museums prefer Flickr to Wikimedia commons?"

Some of the responses included:

Nick: Flickr lets you choose CC non-commercial licenses, whereas Wikimedia Commons needs to permit potential commercial use?

Janet: Apart fr better & clear CC licence info, like Flickr Galleries that can be made by all! [and] What I implied but didn’t say before: Flickr provides online space for dialogue about and with images.

Richard: Flickr is so much easier to view and search than WM. Commons, and of course easier to upload.

Hopefully, I’ve adequately addressed these comments in the body of my post. iane15 had this to say in the comments:

At Hampshire County Council, the Museums Service got 99% to a Flickr Commons agreement, then Flickr said they ” need to delay adding more Commons partners until later in the year”. That was June 2009. Emails in December have gone unanswered. I don’t think we’re even going to bother any more.

Intriguing.]

[Update 2: Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum has just made a detailed reply to this post detailing what advantages the Powerhouse saw (and still sees) in Flickr Commons over Wikimedia Commons. Whilst my blogpost identifies what I see as Wikimedia's advantages for GLAMs, I must admit I do agree with his assessment of Flickr's relative strengths. The kicker is this:

Whilst Wikipedia and Wikimedia are, in themselves, exciting projects, their structure, design and combative social norms do not currently make them the friendly or the protected space that museums tend to be comfortable operating in.

He also reiterates the importance of the Multimedia Usability initiative which might be able to address some of Seb's points (though not all, as some are social rather than technical issues) and hopefully make Wikimedia a little bit more GLAM-friendly.]

Questions:

Should Wikimedia Chapters fundraise?
How should the money raised be distributed between and amongst the Wikimedia Foundation and the Chapters?

Assuming that running this thing we call the Wikimedia Movement costs money, lots of money, the question follows - where does that money come from? The Wikimedia Foundation has three main streams of income (in increasing order of importance):

1. business development;
2. major gifts/grants;
3. community giving a.k.a donations

Furthermore, community giving can be broken down into a) money donated to the Foundation directly and b) money donated to one of the Wikimedia Chapters around the world. This money does not stay only with the organisation that it was donated to but can (and should) be redistributed back and forth. How to do that equitably and for the greatest benefit to the mission is the key.

Should Wikimedia Chapters fundraise?
In my opinion it is part of the core business of Wikimedia Chapters to engage in fundraising. They exist to help grow and develop the Wikimedia movement in their country and collecting money is a key part of that. This does not mean every chapter will be able to raise funds, as it may be especially difficult when a chapter is very new or in a developing nation, but that if it is possible then it should be a priority. There should be other ways to identify with the movement (as Brianna is attempting to map out) and these other forms of “Wikimedia Interest Groups” need not be legal entities or engage in fundraising. That’s not what they’re for and that’s fair enough. But this only increases the importance of the administrative function of Chapters. Fundraising should be central to what Chapters are. Currently the overwhelming majority of money is donated by Americans to the Foundation directly. I would hope that one day donations from other nations constitute a more representative proportionate of the total (and that the total increases). Achieving this requires Chapter engagement in fundraising. I also hope that there will one day be a USA Chapter (with WM-NYC et al as branch organisations) to take care of the fundraising in America that is currently run by the Foundation directly.

How should the money raised be distributed between and amongst the Wikimedia Foundation and the Chapters?

Section 1 - The donation website:

There are at least three ways of setting up the donation website to differentiate between Chapter and Foundation:

• Language edition;
• Location;
• Globally.

Last year it was differentiated by language. For example, the French donation page gave the option to donate to Wikimedia France or Wikimedia Switzerland or the Foundation directly. It looked like this:

This system meant that only if you were looking at the French edition would you be be able to see the French chapter. To my mind this approach is limiting as it assumes language and nation are tied and has the curious effect that some Chapters appear on multiple language links (the Swiss chapter appears four times) but only a very few Chapters would ever be linked from the English edition.

Another proposed option is to provide links to Chapters based on the location of the reader. This requires using the IP address of readers to give a rough estimate of their location and then displaying the donation of the nearest Chapter. Whilst this might seem more nuanced than the language approach it does imply that you would only donate to the Chapter to which you are physically closest. Wikimedia Israel points out that most of the donations to the Israeli Red Cross/Crescent/Crystal actually come from America, not Israel. Equally, most Chapters with large expatriate communities would expect a large proportion of donations from overseas. The Indian Chapter is another example. For this reason I don’t think the location-based system is equitable either.

The third main option is to simply show everyone! And I suggest this is best. In short, have an interactive version of the map that appears at the Wikimedia Foundation page listing all chapters. Perhaps add an alphabetical list of Chapters and some zoom functionality for Europe where there are a lot of chapters in a smaller area:

Section 2 - the money flow:

[caveat: this is just my thinking and a first draft proposal. If you don't like parts of it, that's fine, it's not like this is set in stone. But please don't bite my head off.]

So, how do we make the most utility out of the money that is given to the Wikimedia Movement and how do we make those donors as happy as possible? I suggest that the answer is a multi-stage process and each Chapter will need to find the stage that is most suited to its level of organisational maturity. The underlying principles of my proposal are:

• Different Chapters have different levels of capacity and therefore they should be treated as such. Different rights and responsibilities should be accorded to Chapters as they grow;
• The amount of money that is currently raised is barely scratching the surface of what can be achieved and should be achieved if we ever hope to fulfill our mission;
• The Wikimedia movement will remain in flux for a long time to come and so there can be no set/fixed/universally-applied solution. Power relationships will change and so too will the makeup of the movement.
• Irrespective of the stage that a Chapter is at, it should still appear at the donation website and on the map. The reason for this is that donors should not have to wade through all of the minutiae of Chapter/Foundation relations - they just want to donate. So, we should make a nice neat and consistent website and the Wikimedia community can work out all the fiddly bits behind the scenes (with appropriate disclosure and documentation if donors really want to know, of course).
• These ’stages’ only really apply to the central donation website as Chapters are still able to undertake their own independent fundraising on other websites (or shake a bucket at people in the street!) if they want to.

The three models I propose below would not be employed universally - each Chapter would need to choose the model that most suits it independently of what the others are doing. The diagrams below represent what would happen if every Chapter was the same. In practice, all three models would be in place simultaneously.

Stage 1: Centralised
[Appropriate for newly formed Chapters, Chapters in very small or developing nations]

The first step, the one that places the least onus on the Chapter, is for the donation system to be centralised into the Wikimedia Foundation and all donors’ money given via the main donation website would be given directly to the Foundation. Then, once the money is raised, distributed back to the Chapter via the grants system to undertake projects/events/local outreach/capacity building. This system would mean that a Chapter would not have to invest its limited time/resources in undertaking a fundraiser (and managing the bureaucracy that comes with that), donors would be assured of being treated professionally and the Chapter could then focus more of its time on being a “free culture service provider”.

Stage 2: Hybrid
[Appropriate for middle-sized/established Chapters with a local presence and some capacity]

This is the stage that effectively mirrors what happened last year for all chapters - the proverbial “50/50 money”. Donors can now give money to the Chapter directly but a proportion of that money must be handed up to the Foundation. Equally, the Foundation grants program is still in place if the Chapter wishes to apply for it. Alongside the added power that comes with being able to take money directly from donors via the main donation website must also come added responsibilities - more stringent financial reporting and donor relationship being the key ones. Of course, it is up for debate what proportion of money is handed up to the Foundation and/or the process for agreeing to spend that money on a Chapter sponsored project.

Stage 3: Distributed
[Appropriate for large, professionalised chapters]

In this final stage, the one that I would hope all chapters - at least in developed nations - should aspire to (especially the mythical USA chapter) is that all donations go directly to the chapter via the main donation website (the inverse of stage 1). Chapters are thereby the primary source of money into the Wikimedia movement and would therefore have commensurately high responsibilities to look after that money. Also, as the core funding would be coming in via the Chapters rather than directly to the Foundation, this would require that a larger proportion of that funding be handed up to the Foundation to maintain and grow its fundamental services. (This will not be a problem until the USA national Chapter starts to compete with the Foundation for donors). The Chapters grant process may be less prominent in this stage as by then the Chapters should be quite self-sustaining. On the other hand, the grants program might become larger as bigger projects are undertaken.

Well, “GLAM-WIKI: finding the common ground” is over and I can now, in theory, get to sleep. However there are still a range of things to do and I really want to try to keep the momentum up and the conversation continuing as much as possible. You can see at the event page all of the media stories that mentioned the event as well as the blog posts that are starting to come in from the attendees. We got a lot of interesting press, including a rather backhanded compliment in the major newspaper of all the biggest cities and I even got on a very popular breakfast radio show across the whole country (audio interview).

The twitter stream for #GLAM-WIKI picked up over 500 tweets from more than 70 different people. It became extremely busy during the “politics and policy” session on the morning of day 2 (panelists listed here).

There will be videos of all sessions placed online sometime soon so you’ll be able to see what happened and feel like you were there! The videos are currently exporting to DVD in real time so that will take a couple of days + editing, post production, transcoding, uploading…

So, in the mean time, I thought I’d give you some speeches to read since I have no videos to show you just yet. The keynote address by Senator Kate Lundy can be seen here at her blog. As you can see - this is a politician who actually “gets” open access. It will help the non-Australian readers to know that “NBN” is the National Broadband Network, a proposal to bring our pathetic internet infrastructure into the 21st century with a national, government funded, fibre-to-the-home network. If this policy were any better it would fart glitter. On the other hand, the Australian government still has the concept of the “clean feed internet filter” as its policy. The internet giveth, the internet taketh away…

The other speech I can share with you is my own opening address. I hope you like it:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to “GLAM-WIKI: finding the common ground”. This is the first of what I hope to be many similar discussions around the world about how the Wikimedia community can work with the cultural sector. We’ve heard and talked about each other a lot in the past and so I thought it important that we come together to talk with each other.

What we hope to achieve out of these two days is a brief document, listing some requests from each community to the other that can be used as a basis of discussion in the future and allows each community to officially request things of the other. It is very difficult to advocate for changes in large organisations (or large communities) and this is even more difficult without some kind of proof that the changes are important or even wanted. That’s what we hope to achieve here - to give each other proof of a demonstrable need for reforms. Of course these suggestions are not promises. The Wikimedia community as a whole makes these kinds of decisions on a consensus model but by demonstrating what cultural institutions would like allows us to advocate in our community for a collaborative approach more effectively. Equally, we do not hold you to be bound by any of the suggestions and it is possible that some won’t even apply to your organisation. But at least these suggestions can be used to start discussions within your own department, organisation, sector. If we don’t tell each other what we want and where we come from, then we’ll never know where we need to improve.

The four themes of this conference - Technology, Law, Business and Education - will form the basic structure of discussions today and tomorrow. In the Wikimedia world we do not pretend to be experts in professional practices of these various fields, but our projects do impact on them to some considerable degree.

• To the Educators - Wikimedia projects are at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy. We give people descriptive information but it is those with expert knowledge at the forefront of their field who perform the important task of new research and analytical work. Wikipedia is not competing with that. In fact, it requires this original research and the verifiable sources to be undertaken.
• To the Techies - We are an Free-Libre Open Source platform of websites and software that runs on a LAMP stack. You are free to create tools that plug in to our open-API. We provide complete and specialised dumps of the entire database for you to work with. We encourage new tools or improvements to existing tools that can use, incorporate or adapt our content in interesting and educative ways.
• To the Curators - Wikimedia projects are all about contextualisation of information within a wider catalogue of knowledge. Information is just data if it left on its own, so we attempt to give information an ordered, categorised, structured (yet highly fluid) meaning. The journey that a curator provides can be built from the raw materials of our free-content and equally those interlocking stories can be re-incorporated back.
• To the business-men and women - Whist we are a free project with no commercials, but we have no non-commercial content. You are free and encouraged to take what we offer and make as much money and commercial advantage as you want with it without asking permission or paying fees. All we ask is that you attribute us and share any improvements you have made to Wikimedia content back to it - and in turn, to the rest of the world.
• And finally to the economists - Clay Shirkey said that we are living through what you might call a “positive supply side shock to the amount of freedom in the world”. This is disruptive to the system but has enormous potential benefits.

Last time I was here, I went up to the name plaques on the wall and watched lady find her relative’s name - stroking the nameplate, kissing a poppy and wedge it into the wall alongside hundreds of others. Just like people shining up parts of bronze statues, people are compelled to interact with their culture. This lady’s actions are a particularly Australian expression of this desire to interact, a form of expression that is not just permitted but encouraged. This is a form of read/write culture. Not just a static, read-only, memorial where you are but permitted to look. It is subtle but important active engagement. Notable also is the fact that a decision was made to place no entrance fee to participate in this cultural activity or to visit the museum. To charge an entrance fee to this museum would seem incongruous. And so we have at the Australian War Memorial a very apt example of read/write culture and of Free-culture. A culture that is both free in the sense of liberty and free of charge. These are the principles that underpin everything we do in Wikimedia.

We all know the phrase “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand”. Over the past decades we have been increasingly encouraged to interact with our culture in museums and to become engaged with our heritage rather than just to observe it, locked behind glass display cases.

Now, we also have a digital culture and you can see by the enthusiasm of people taking, copying, sharing re-editing and interacting with their digital culture, that there is not a decreasing interest in cultural engagement, but an increasing interest - just in a new location. The very fact that Wikipedia - the seemingly most mundane of knowledge forms, an encyclopedia - is the 4th busiest location online is testament to this. People are thirsty for knowledge. Thirsty to take it and use it and interact with it on their own terms. However, this kind of behaviour is often discouraged, sometimes criminalised. The old rule of “Look, but don’t touch” is the message that is being send out.

Just as there has been a move to open up the display cases and make engaging physical spaces in cultural institutions I encourage you to think of these two days as working out ways of sustainably opening up the digital display cabinets so that your visitors might be able to continue to interact with their culture in this new space.

At this point I would like to recognise that we are in Ngunawal country. Whose people have been the custodians of this land since the dreaming. Looking after it for future generations whist still living within it. They did not “own” it in the western sense of the word but looked after it out of a sense of profound respect for the land. I would like to draw parallels with you. Your institutions are similarly the cultural custodians of our heritage - not as proprietors of culture but as protectors of it.

I believe there are important parallels between the Aboriginal relationship to the land and Wikipedia’s approach to knowledge. We bring what we can to the common project out of respect for what has gone before. What we are driven by is the creation and maintenance of nothing less than a mirror of our own culture for no other reason than because we think it important to preserve - for our generation and into the future.

So - In passing over to Jennifer Riggs, Chief Program Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, to open this unprecedented event, I urge you to think about how we all - as custodians of our cultural heritage - can open up the digital display cases.”

Wikimedia Australia’s forthcoming event “GLAM-WIKI: Finding the common ground” is now fully booked!

Below you can see the list of attending institutions - some are sending one person, several are sending six staff members - to a total of 170 attendees! (Is this the largest Wikimedia event besides Wikimania?) We’re absolutely pleased as punch to have seen such interest from across the Australian and New Zealand cultural sector. Just as there is interest from within the Wikimedia world to learn about the cultural sector, there is very clear interest from them to learn about us. In fact, “Digital New Zealand” has blogged about it a couple of times - asking the “homework questions” that I’ve asked all the attendees to their own readers.

We’ve also put out a press release about the event. Our generous hosts, the Australian War Memorial will also be filming the presentations so we’ll have those online (with a free licenses) soon afterwards. Finally, can I extend my thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation and their Chapter grants program - without which this event would not have been possible.

AARNet
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
ACT Library and Information Service
ACT Museums and Galleries
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Arts Victoria
Atlas of Living Australia
Australian Council of National Trusts
Australian Greens
Australian Labor Party
Australian Liberal Party
Australian Library and Information Association
Australian Museum
Australian National Botanic Gardens
Australian National Herbarium
Australian National University
Australian Policy Online, Swinburne University
Australian Research Council
Australian Society of Archivists
Australian War Memorial
Canberra Museum and Gallery
Centre for Media and Communications Law
City of Sydney
Collections Australia Network
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
Curriculum Corporation
CustomWare
Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre
Department of the Environment Water Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA)
Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE)
Dictionary of Sydney
DigitalNZ
Education.au
Historic Houses Trust of NSW
History Trust of South Australia
Horsons Bay Libraries
International Conservation Services
Macquarie University
Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs
Museum of Australian Democracy
Museum Victoria
Museums & Galleries NSW
Museums Aotearoa
Museums Australia
Museums Australia (Victoria)
National Archives of Australia
National Film & Sound Archive
National Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Victoria
National Library New Zealand
National Library of Australia
National Museum of Australia
National Portrait Gallery of Australia
National Trust NSW
NSW Department of Education and Training
Parliamentary Library
Powerhouse Museum
Queensland Museum
Queensland University of Technology
Sovereign Hill Museum
State Library of New South Wales
Swinburne University
Toowoomba Regional Council
University of Canberra
UNSW Faculty of Law
Western Australian Museum
Western Plains Cultural Centre

… and Wikimedians from the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia, Germany and the USA.

[and yes, I did ask permission from the attendees to publish the name of the institution they represent]

In the last few weeks I’ve been laughed at several times. Openly, with ridicule.

When introduced to new people they invariably ask me what I do and so I try to explain as quickly as I can the difference between Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Chapters and (if they’re a techie) MediaWiki. Anyone involved in the Wikimedia world has had this conversation many times.

Now, I usually expect the question that begins “…but who controls it” and the other question that begins “…what if there’s mistakes” but what I’ve not expected is getting questions about how much money the Wikimedia movement makes from advertisements. I demur and say how there are no ads. and that the project is run by a charitable (US Based) foundation.

It is at this point I get laughed at. Most people do not know that Wikimedia projects Do.Not.Have.Ads. Many people don’t believe that We.Exist.Because.Of.Donations. Some people think I’m lying or trying to deceive them when I say it’s a charity and so they laugh in my face. And I mean 20-something, educated professionals who tell me how often they use Wikipedia already. The fact that people who I would have thought know this stuff already does come as a surprise and must be an indictment of our public information on Wikipedia itself. After all - 99% of people who use Wikipedia would never read the bit at the bottom of the page that says “Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.”

I sincerely hope the upcoming Credibility Campaign being prepared by Jay Walsh will hope alleviate this. If people (who are already using Wikipedia!) think that contributing time, effort or money to Wikipedia is just going towards a for-profit company making ludicrous amounts of money from advertisements then we’ve got a problem. At the very least it’s quite uncomfortable to be ridiculed across a dinner table for telling people that Wikimedians do it for the love of it, not for personal or corporate profit.

[n.b. Whilst the Wikimedia Foundation is a charity in the USA and most of the Chapters are also charitable in their respective country, the chapter I am a representative of - Wikimedia Australia - is a non-profit but does not meet has not yet been approved for charitable status in Australia nor has Wikimedia UK yet met their requirements. Hopefully we can sort this out soon.]