GLAM/Newsletter/February 2015/Contents/Germany report
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Open GLAM is one thing - open funds quite another
Coding da Vinci is approaching
Within reach now is the second edition of Coding da Vinci the German hackathon on culture and art data. Registration is open. In February we released our film on last years edition. Also 2015 we are four partners to arrange the hackathon. Which is one of the reasons why we are able to succeed with the hackathon. We hardly speak about costs in this newsletter, but the hackathon with 150 data wranglers, 16 participating GLAMs and two big events in Berlin with all together no less than 350 guests (figures from 2014) will have an estimated cost of 80.000€. This means both paying a project team, grants and prizes to the coding people and costs relating to the event itself such as facilities, catering and so forth. The main funding comes from the partners own budget.
As we learned last year the data needs more work before you can actually start to use it, we planned to have paid IT staff to "rinse" it before it is released. In order to finance this work package WMDE tried its luck in crowd funding for data rinsing. As You all may know a crowd funding campaign is a project by it self. We had to produce a film, coordinate the campaign with all of the four partners and than try to get people to get involved. The campaign is still running for a week but it will be very hard to overcome the threshold of 10.000 € we aim for. And in crowd funding, as You may know, it is either you'll make it or you don't. Most likely, the money we have collected so far will not be at our disposal. Still I like to share our experience with you. We underestimated the intricacy of the project. The benefits to the crowd funders are apparently to abstract to be motivating and this despite we had the opportunity to address a large audience. I still consider crowd funding to be a clever tool to choose for funding projects within the Wikimedia world. As proven by wiki cheese by WMFR, but there you see, cheese is tasty. Rinsing cultural data is certainly a respectable task but I have to admit not as belly pleasing. Support the campaign is possible until Tuesday 17th of March.
But it is the spirit that counts, so we are looking forward to host again a wide range of developers in April in Berlin willing to compete with their ideas and skills in new applications using the API both from Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata and others combining them with open GLAM data for new open source products. Feel free to join us.
