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Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Libre Graphics Meeting 2014 at Leipzig

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This was a draft for a blog post that has since been published at https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/06/06/libre-graphics-meeting-2014-at-leipzig/

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Libre Graphics Meeting 2014 at Leipzig

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David Gómez (Member, Wikimedia Spain and Amical Wikimedia) and Rubén Ojeda (Member, Wikimedia Spain)

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Gráfica Liebre and Wikimedia Spain Workshop.

Libre Graphics Meeting ( LGM ) started in 2006 as an annual event that brings together graphic designers and developers of free software for design, desktop publishing, photo editing, 3D modeling and animation. Last year it took place in Madrid, hosted by MediaLab-Prado. This year the event took place in Leipzig from April 2-5. Our purpose in hosting the meeting in Leipzig was to connect the community around free graphics with the Wikimedia movement and the creative graphics community around Wikimedia Commons. This academic year the wikiArS initiative has been launched in Madrid to involve the schools of art and design in the objectives of Wikimedia and free knowledge. A collaboration between Wikimedia Spain and Gráfica Liebre studio have begun to hold workshops in which attendees produce graphics using free software that are uploaded on Commons. The wikiArS initiative has been developed over the last three school years with seven schools in Catalonia who participated with Amical Wikimedia and with the participation of the University of Cadiz in collaboration with Wikimedia Spain. We went to Leipzig to present on our experiences and offer it as a model to be emulated in other countries.

WikiArS talk at Libre Graphics Meeting 2014.

The presence of wikimedians in LGM is low even though Wikipedia is perceived by participants as positive and it was cited in some workshops (for example Free culture aware educators in art and design) as a reference model in terms of collaboration and governance. The overlap of principles regarding free culture makes us think that in the coming years we should strive for greater collaboration between the two communities. After our workshop, some people expressed interest in starting a similar experience in their respective fields, so we may soon see the start of wikiArS in other parts of the world. As is the case in many art schools, students work on assignments to produce scientific or historical images and ultimately count on the advice of an expert. This process can take weeks or months. For our two-hours workshops, the images should be different, the participants should be able to work independently without expert advice. In relation to that, it's useful to select images that the Commons community has already established a model for. In the LGM workshop we proposed vectoring coats of arms of cities close to Leipzig, typographical diagrams of free fonts and maps of urban parks of Leipzig. Participants chose the first two options and mainly used Inkscape to create vector images, then uploaded them to Commons using the version of UploadWizard adapted to wikiArS. Also noteworthy was the contribution of one participant, Brent Yorgey, who used the Haskell language to generate SVG graphics, later publishing the code in a Commons subpage for anyone who wants to create variants of it. Previously, Brent had presented in this talk the Diagrams library package for Haskell.

wikiArS workshop at Libre Graphics Meeting in Leipzig, April 2014.

Besides giving the talk and workshop, attending the LGM was a chance for us to learn more about free graphic projects and the people who developed them. The more established graphic creation software developers gave updates and outlined their future plans. And also new and less well-known projects were present. We were also able to learn about libre graphics projects about education, documentation and other issues, not strictly related with the development of graphic tools. Like the "Commons Machinery" project that develops resources and generates proposals to preserve the metadata of published works on the Internet and to maintain context information associated with the artworks.


It was interesting to participate in a session to link and strengthen a network of educators committed to the free culture that had begun in the previous year's edition of LGM in Madrid. Ideas about the resistance of teachers, students and educational institutions to the adoption of free software graphics were shared along with cases in which this resistance is starting to be overcome. The network has a web page, mailing list and will develop other forms of coordination, in addition to the idea of developing modular curricula that may be useful as a model for teachers.

The coat of arms of Thummlitzwalde.

In general, the free graphic community is willing to take advantage of the capabilities of the tools being developed and improved. There is an interesting component when experimenting with new tools and new features along with technical rigorousness to resolve bugs and complex issues. Its diversity and activity contrasts with the concentration in the area of proprietary software, in which Adobe is becoming the only actor. In Libre Graphics Meeting we discovered a widely shared interest in typography. Several lectures and workshops dealt with the development of typefaces, using Fontforge, or about projects that exploit the potential of the OpenType format.


Being together in Leipzig with the Gráfica Liebre team was a good opportunity to get to know each other better and to share ideas on wikiArS and strategies to follow to connect the contribution of graphics with free licenses and creating them with free tools. We got to know a nice East German city and were able to visit the Museum of Applied Arts showing a path from antiquity to the present day through the Stilj Jugend, the Art Deco and Bauhaus. The experience in LGM was a success in terms of spreading the wikiArS initiative, getting in touch with the libre graphics community and to test this type of workshop. Areas in which we hope to deepen in the coming years.

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