 Hi everybody, welcome to this session promoting WikiGlam projects in Latin America. For those who don't know me, I am Patricia Diaz-Rubio, and I am the Executive Director of WikiMedia Chile, but I am personally very engaged in promoting open culture policies and strategies and projects in Chile but also very dedicated to discussing these subjects and topics around our region, around Latin America. So there's an ether path that it should be linked in the chat where you can put all of your questions, comments, ideas, or anything that you would like to share with me and with the audience. I'll read it very thoughtfully after the session but I'll also be trying to answer your questions after the presentation. My presentation is not that long, honestly, to be honest with you. So I'm leaving some space at the end of the session for us to chat and to interact a little bit as the platform allows us. So we are going to... Let's see if this works. Okay, let's click again. Okay, so before jumping directly to the topics of this session, I want to show you or explain you a little bit how I'm going to present you these topics, right? First, I'm going to start with a little context and try to explain why this is something that I care about and why this is something that I would like to share with you. Then I'm going to present you a little diagnosis that I have been creating or co-creating with other regional Wikimedians. And finally, I'm going to share with you some ideas and strategies for Wikiglam projects that I have learned working with my Latin American colleagues. So, well, the context, right? Why talking about Wikiglam in Latin America? I would like to situate a little bit my own experience as an open glam or Wikiglam applicator in Chile and Latin America. Well, I am a social communicator and I have a diploma in cultural heritage promotion. And since 2018, I've been leading Wikimedia Chile. And since I arrived to the movement, I realized that open glam or Wikiglam was a very recurrent project or topic within Wikimedia affiliates, right? We have education programs, we have community programs and we normally have Wikiglam or open glam programs and projects. So for me, it was very, let's say, natural or spontaneous the idea to engage in these projects and to start developing interesting things with glam or cultural institutions, right? Yet, I found very quickly that it was very difficult to develop those projects or even connecting with glam. It was something very hard to do. I discovered that institutions were very reticent to work with us as Wikimedia Chile and that for them Wikimedia projects were whether unnecessary or too complicated or unknown. And even for those who knew us, for those institutions who had worked with Wikimedia Chile in the past before I arrived, that they understood Wikimedia initiatives or projects or collaborations like a one-time thing. So they were not very enthusiast about the idea to re-engage or to give a certain continuity to these projects, which was very frustrating for me. And I also faced the difficulty that I didn't have or it was hard for me to find concrete examples of regional successful projects to show them and to invite them to join these initiatives. Sorry, my phone just died. So I was thinking why it's so hard to find these regional examples of successful Wikiglam projects. So I decided to ask my colleagues, why this is so hard? Why it's just me or maybe there's something else here. So talking to them, I realized that it was not just a Wikimedia Chile thing, right? That executing Wikiglam projects in Latin America was a hard thing to do. Talking with them, I realized that we all had the same problems, that GLAMs were very reticent to work with us or with other open-knowledge organizations or initiatives. And that when this project existed, when my colleagues arrived to have these projects or to develop these projects, they were not representative of the amount of work and efforts that they used to put on them. So they were normally very small projects and just a few number of contents. So it was not very representative of the efforts that they developed. So the objectives or the things that I wanted to do knowing this situation, and this is the thing that I want to share with you, is that I wanted to understand which were the experiences that Wikimedia regional affiliates were having around Wikiglam projects, identify the arguments that regional GLAMs used to question or to take some distance from Wikiglam projects and also the most important thing, trying to create or propose common strategies to face those limitations or the arguments that this institution just gave us from a regional perspective. So just like I said in the beginning, I tried to build a sort of like a diagnosis. This is a collective diagnosis. This is not only my work. This is the result of a lot of conversations that I've been having with my colleagues from Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico. So it's just not an Uruguay as well. It's not only a Chilean thing. So talking with my regional colleagues, just like I said, we identified four main limitations or difficulties for engaged Wikiglam projects in our countries. Limited resources, GLAM institutional structures, misleading conceptions about going open and finally, a certain prevalence of a global north perspective on how Wikiglam looks like. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about these four reasons that we found. Oh, sorry. Well, first of all, this went crazy. This is going crazy. Okay. Okay, here we are. Well, limited resources, right? As many GLAMs in Latin America are public or depend on public funds. They normally lack of resources to invest in infrastructure, technology, staff training, or even in the maintenance of their buildings. The Fire Museum in Rio de Janeiro or Indian Cinematic in Sao Paulo recently showed us, right? And this is a very regional reality. And this lack of resources also affect GLAM practitioners. Their schedules are normally overloaded. They are frequently underpaid. They don't have many opportunities, time, or let's be honest, energy to train or learn new things like open strategies or open projects or open policies. As a result, going digital, right, which is key to create and to engage Wikiglam projects, is a situation that is still very undeveloped within these institutions. And even though we have some successful experience in Colombia or in Chile, the truth is that many of these institutions need a lot of support, still need a lot of support on preserving digital copies of their assets and collections. One reason that we identified is GLAM's institutional structures. Because regional GLAM practitioners are rarely involved in copyright or legislation discussions, even though these discussions or these policies really affect the way in which they work, and of course the administration or impact that their collections have. In Latin America, normally these decisions pass directly through legal departments or high-run executives, and they are not consulted with technical or specialized professionals who are the ones that we normally contact or connect with when developing these structures. And this structure, this institutional structure, which is very vertical and is quite common within GLAMs, especially those who belong to the public sector, make harder for us as Wikimedians to reach those decision makers and engage them in the Wikietos. And as many of you know, if decision makers are not engaged in Wikiglam or open GLAM projects, projects won't succeed, unfortunately. I'm going to pass you the next topic. The third difficulty that we have found is that it seems that some GLAM practitioners have some misleading conceptions about what going open could mean for them. They normally fear that going open or even going online will translate into the situation that they might lose control over their collections. We have heard that they fear that their collections will be used wrongly or uncontextualized or without their permissions, or even commercially, which is a highly no-no with some GLAM practitioners, especially or at least in the Chilean case where GLAM practitioners tend to be very conservative about their role. But talking to them, we have also identified that they fear losing their leading role in the Wikiverse, for example, where everybody can participate and where there's no mediation. And I say it like this because we know that that's not true, right? That going digital, online or open does not mean that mediation is not going to be necessary anymore. GLAM practitioners that we have met fear that they won't be needed any longer. And sadly, that fear, it's expressed in a lot of negativity or even content towards Wikimedia initiatives, or at least that has been our experience, I think called a little bit of everything. As a cultural extractivist that I want to take advantage of in institutions and some other things that many of you already have heard from me. I'm going to pass to the next. And finally, a fourth limitation. It's the prevalence of a certain global north perspective how Wikiglam looks like or how it should look like. And in the region, in Latin America, talking with my colleagues, I realized that we have taken awareness that this concept does not make too much sense for us. You know, the GLAM acronym. But first of all, because it is in English, right? So naturally, it doesn't make too much sense for us. But also because it tends to be too narrow and do not represent the diversity of things that we do when we do Wikiglam projects. And I think that we are very clear about the necessity to create a new concept or an alternative concept that could really reflect the work that we do with cultural and artistic assets and traditional collections, but also with other types of cultural document or pieces like media or newspapers or photographs. But also the work that we do with communities, stories with ancestral and artistic knowledge, with places and memory sites, which, you know, are a huge factor in Latin America. So, well, this is the diagnosis. Now I would like to share a few ideas and strategies to promote these, let's say, open culture, Wikiglam projects or whatever the name that we want to choose for, call it. And these are all ideas and strategies that I have learned working with my regional colleagues. So the first idea or the strategy to create those projects, even though we have already identified all these difficulties, we want to keep promoting these projects anyway, right? So the first strategy or idea is trying to identify what clans need in general and how we can eventually help them in those needs with the resources that we have as Wikimedia affiliates, structures, chapters, initiatives, whatever. Because understanding that they are lacking a lot of resources, right? And the resources are very limited within clans. They have a lot of needs. And we have some resources that can help them to overcome those limitations, right? So in Wikimedia Chile, in Wikimedia Argentina, for example, we have been focusing a lot on training sessions on open culture, on what open culture means, for example, to try to help practitioners to understand what going open really means. So they can eventually be motivated or even engage in particular projects with us. We also invite you, if you are also thinking about developing these projects, in trying to identify and develop concrete tools and learning experience to share with clans, right? Because it's really important to create learning experiences that they could translate into concrete and bounded projects. Because that's going to be easier for them to translate those ideas to their superiors, right? The objective of, for example, this activity that Wikimedia Argentina developed was to present them very concrete projects that they could apply into their institutions because that's more easy to present to others, to their bosses, for example, than just ideas or notions about what going open means. Focus on smaller scale projects or institutions. This is a very personal reflection, but even though we all want to engage national museums or big collections in our projects, the experience, the regional experience, showed us, showed it's better to start with local institutions in a smaller scale. If they are successful, these projects can be later presented or escalated to broader territories or bigger institutions. So even though it may be it's not the ideal thing to start by engaging the national gallery of your country or your territory, you are going to have maybe more impact in a smaller community. And you can have better collaborations in the future if you start with smaller institutions. A fourth strategy or suggestion is to centralize some efforts through relevant collaborators. So if we have the chance to work with a big institution or an institution-sized medium, we can collaborate. They could play a hub role by centralizing resources or capacity-building experiences and then passing them onto smaller institutions or territories. So for example, we have some experiences in the region where Wikimedia chapters had identified not national but regional institutions like regional museums, for example, and they have trained them and then these institutions have done the same, training smaller or more community institutions. So like that, we can pass the message to a broader territory. Also, it's very important to work with local cultural practitioners. That's fundamental to develop successful and long-standing Wikiglam or OpenGlam projects. Engaged practitioners are one of the best type of ambassadors that the Wikimedia movement can have in this quest. And having them in our site represents an enormous collaboration possible. Reach out to them and make them feel part of a community. Invite them to your activities. Prepare training sessions, especially for them. Try to engage them in your chapter and your group and your initiative and somehow that they could really feel that they can be sort of like a bridge between Wikimedia and their institutions. And finally, and this is sort of like a challenge for us as Wikimedians, is trying to redefine what Wikiglam means for Latin American Wikimedians and our communities. This is an image of a workshop that Wikimedia Columbia launched in 2020 or 2021, I am not sure. But it was a workshop around images of the protest that they had around those years, political and social protest. And we consider that as a glam type of project, right? Because for us in Latin America, culture means way more than just the things that happens within libraries or museums, you know, like institutions or places or practitioners. We try to understand culture in a broader way. It involves the different ways in which our societies express and represent themselves and their history and their diversity and things that are happening right now today in our streets, in our public places. So we know that this is a huge challenge, but, oh sorry, but understanding that as Wikimedians, we want to collect, register and preserve all type of content. And we have to start seeing culture as something bigger, brighter and way more complex and diverse, the way in which we traditionally understand glam projects. And this is the invitation that I wanted to do to you as well today. Thank you. Thank you so much for this, for this time. I don't know, I'm going to extend the chat because it's so small that unfortunately, you know, I don't see very well. So I don't know if you have any questions that you have put on the chat before. Unfortunately, I cannot go back to the chat, so if you have any questions or comments, please copy them again so I can see that because when I was presenting, I wasn't able to see the chat. But I do agree with what Anna is saying, that we really need to follow this discussion, right? To continue with this discussion in Latin America and hopefully in other regions of the world. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. If you have any other comments or if it's okay if you don't have questions, but if you have other comments or, I don't know, reflections or anything else that you would like to share with me or with my regional colleagues, please put it in the etherpad so I can collect them and then share them with them. And please, if you can write your name and maybe the city or the country in which you are, that would be really cool for me and it allowed me to understand, you know, like this map of people interested in this perspective. So thank you. And yes, good idea, Scan. We should have a telegram group or I know there's a, I know that there's a wiki-glam, like global telegram group but maybe we should have something more regional or, I don't know, a different thing. Oh, there's a lot of comments. I think you wanna, it's that I, let's see. Sorry, this is very uncomfortable for you, I imagine. Yeah, I'm going to read it. These are all great points. Even for us in the Global North, we are struggling many times to display the impact of our wiki-glam. Okay, very true. A lot of those in GLAMs are very touchy about being open. I saw it first-hand organizing wiki-loves Africa in Nigeria. Well, we shared the struggle. I agree that the GLAM acronym is too narrow and even though in practice we embrace it much. Okay, so some possible terms we could try beyond GLAM, cultural and heritage partnerships or more generally, memory institutions. Sometimes I use the phrase knowledge in the public interest. Oh, I love that. To describe entities that have a common cause. But few of these are easy to say like GLAM. Yeah, it works. It sounds good but maybe not that good for people who does not speak English. Let's say the smaller institutions can then advocate for you to larger institutions when they see the success. Yeah, that's the idea. Is it hard to explain when institutions are about to open movement? Yes, very hard. Okay, so we have to go. We only have like 10 seconds left. Thank you so much for all for coming. I'm looking forward reading your messages and ideas in the other part. And thank you. Thank you so much for being here. We'll be in contact. Bye. Gracias. Ciao. Muchas gracias.