Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Czech Republic/2012-11-12

Wikimedia Czech Republic report 11/2012 - 12/2012

Main events

Community meetings

There were 4 community meetings, the first one in České Budějovice (7th November 2012, Modre dvere restaurant), another two in Prague (19th November 2012, 17th December 2012) and the last one in Pardubice (20th December 2012)

• The first Prague meeting (19th November, Res publica) was attended by 9 wikipedians. They discussed the Wikiconference, scheduled to take place several days later. The main issue related to the Wikiconference were arrangements of technical means for recording presentations to enable their later reviewing. The technical aspects were solved to general satisfaction.
• The second community meeting took place in Prague (17th December 2012, U Holanů). It was attended by 8 wikipedians. The discussion was mostly about general topics.
• The third community meeting in Pardubice (20th December 2012) was attended by 4 members. The goal of this meeting was to promote Wikimedia Czech Republic outside of the Czech capital. Therefore, mostly the chapter activities, Wikiconference and Wiki Loves Monuments were topics of the evening.
• The České Budějovice meeting was attended by four wikipedians and the main topics discussed were: WLM, photographic workshops, the Jewish Monuments grant and Wikidata.

New members

Two new volunteers joined Wikimedia Czech Republic shortly after the Wikiconference. The number of WMCZ members therefore rose to 41.

Board meetings

The only regular board meeting was on 18th December 2012 in Café Kolíbka, Prague. Members of the Board were informed on the account data related to 2011 and 2012 by the chapters' accountant (to be presented in detail in March 2012). With regard to this report the term of the regular 2013 General Assembly has been postponed. The 2013-01-12 term was cancelled and a new one proposed for the late March.

The preparations for the 2013 budget and Programme plan are running. Several members of our community have already commented on the proposal and during this board meeting members of the board decided to approve or reject some minor changes of the budget.

GLAM

Several previous activities of the Czech GLAM continued in November and December 2012.

The main activity, which is backboned by the P&O Grant, is the digitalization of 3000 glass plate stereo slides from the collection of Geographical library Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Science.

Negotiation with Mining Museum Mayrau is also in progress.

3rd meeting of Czech GLAM is prepared. It will take place in February 2013.

Students Write Wikipedia

Our education program "Studenti píší Wikipedii" (Students Write Wikipedia, http://studenti.wikimedia.cz) continued in its main activity, i.e., running courses motivating students to contribute to Wikipedia. Surprisingly, more teachers and/or Wikipedia ambassadors joined us than we had predicted, leading to a total number of 12 projects in the winter term 2012/2013, which is more than ever before. David Zbiral's "Christianity I." (Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno), Lucie Barbapostolosova's Social communication (Faculty of Arts, Palacky University in Olomouc) and Jiri Reif's Landscape and Nature Protection (Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague) all belong to the most successful running projects. With minimum administration (unlike other education programs, over-concentrating on organisation), we reach to talented students in all major regions of the Czech Republic. Highly professional teachers were found using a motivation campaign in the first phase of the projects, and now the teachers themselves are writing to join our program.

The program sees the VisualEditor as a future milestone in Wikipedia-University collaborations and encourages everyone responsible to speed up the programming process. Also, we are considering to write a short blog-post manual, explaining in simple steps how to create an education program easily and with minimum bureaucracy and human resources needed.

See projects here: http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedie:Studenti_p%C3%AD%C5%A1%C3%AD_Wikipedii/Na%C5%A1e_projekty

See the recent changes here: http://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speciální:Související_změny&target=Wikipedie:Studenti_píší_Wikipedii/Poslední_změny

Grants (Mediagrant and P&O)

The activities related to the Mediagrant and Presentation & Outreach grant continued in November and December 2012. No changes were made to the already functioning structure.

Presentation & Outreach

The main event financed by the Presentation & Outreach grant was the 4th Wikiconference (24th November 2012).

The second issue of the internal "Wikimedium" magazine was published in November 2012. It focused mostly on the current developement of the wiki movement, as well as the Wiki Loves Monuments contest in the Czech Republic.

Mediagrant

The main event sponsored by Mediagrant was the Prague Botanical Garden photographic workshop, which took place on 15th December 2012. The workshop consisted of three parts (a lecture with a profesional photographer, taking pictures in the Fata Morgána greenhouse and in the end evaluating and reviewing the pictures) and was attended by 13 people, most of which were new to Wikipedia. See link for full story.

Thanks to the Mediagrant, new photographic equipment was bought, including a handy photographic backpack and a diffusor tent.

• Photographing of Czech Municipalities Grant continued to operate (10 trips were made). We succesfully encouraged some WLM participants to join this activity.
• Protected Areas Grant continued to operate (1 trip)
• Jewish monuments grant continued to operate

Other activities

Wikiconference

The 4th annual Wikiconference took place on 24th November 2012 in Balling's Room of National Technical Library in Prague, Czech Republic. A total number of more than 100 people - members, lay Wikipedia editors and Internet fans, as well as important invited guests - took part in the Wikiconference during the day.

The topics presented by speakers comprised main areas of our activities or projects. Several Mediagrant projects were presented (Protected areas, Photography of Czech industry), as well as the institutions that initiated cooperation with Wikimedia Czech Republic thanks to GLAM (i. e. National Heritage Institution) or Students Write Wikipedia (i. e. Faculty of Science, Charles University).

Winners of the Wiki Loves Monuments and the Financial Literacy Day contests were announced and rewarded.

Thanks to our partners, the National Heritage Institute and the Silesian Museum in Opava, we were proud to announce WLM winners in 3 categories - the main one, the Pernstein category and the Silesian one. One of the winners, who was Filipino, could not visit Prague for this event. The Philippine Embassy in Prague took the prize in his name.

12 months for 12 NGO's

Wikipedia successfully joined the 12 months for 12 NGO's event organized by the Etnetera agency. Thanks to this, Wikimedia Czech Republic could use a free advertisment space on a frequented intersection "Špejchar" in Prague. The poster used for this space was one of the "Don't keep it for yourself' posters of WMF, this time modified and translated to Czech.

Negotiation with upper chamber of Czech Republic

WMCZ has established a collaboration with an important state institution, upper chamber of Parliament of the Czech Republic. Contrary to our goal, as a consequence of complicated copyright status of older pictures, we were not able to acquire portraits of all 81 senators. However, it was by no means a failure in the end: WMCZ managed to persuade the senate to release 23 pictures of the newly elected senators and we were given a promise that new senator photos will be released for Wikimedia in the future. Full story at link.