Wikimedia Hackathon
For three days, members of the Wikimedia ecosphere converged on Tallinn, both to work on concrete solutions to technical problems and to discuss their relation to trends and strategic approaches to infrastructure, governance, user experience, knowledge mobilization and interoperability, community building, and more. Given our active research in the area of open digital research infrastructure and digital knowledge commons as part of work on the HSS Commons, and given the ETCL’s longtime support of Wikimedia through initiatives such as the Open Knowledge Program’s Honorary Resident Wikipedian, this event provided us with important insights into the work of this vibrant, open, and inclusive community.
While others hacked, some—like us—chose to yack, attending sessions to learn about the Wikimedia universe and some of its present challenges and opportunities (technical and otherwise). Beyond the informal conversations that took place over the course of the weekend, we also took part in terrific structured sessions on topics such as anti-abuse work on the wikis, UX and “user stories” in the GLAM community, Semantic MediaWiki, web scraping, and how to build further support for the important work of the Wikimedia community.
Participants of the Wikimedia Hackathon in 2024 (making wiki signs). Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Jagiellonian University talk and panel on open science
After Tallinn, we made our way to Krakow for partner meetings with longtime Polish colleagues, as well as several events on the topic of open scholarship / open science. Huge thanks, again, to Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki, and Jagiellonian Centre for Digital Humanities and Flagship Project “Digital Humanities Lab” for inviting us to Krakow to talk about the HSS Commons.
As part of the discussion that followed, we were able to share news about our ongoing translation of the HSS Commons’ interface to make it increasingly multilingual. We were also invited to situate the HSS Commons’ repository and open software in relation to the SSH Open Cloud and similar open digital research infrastructure in the European context, which—in line with the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership’s “Connection” Cluster and our commitment to interoperability and research accessibility—we’re hoping to integrate with as we move out of beta.
Following our talk, we participated in an invigorating and wide-ranging panel discussion about open science alongside Ewa Gudowska-Nowak (Statistics Physics Department, Jagiellonian U), Maciej Eder (Institute of the Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences), Marek Kimmel (Department of Statistics, Rice U), and Jan Rybicki (Jagiellonian Centre for Digital Humanities and Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian U).
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We’re so very grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in both of these events, and we’re thankful to all of the local partners, researchers, programmers, and event participants that made our time abroad so productive and meaningful.
Graham & Ray