From April 26-28 Lori and Dominic, staff Wikipedians for a Children’s Museum and the National Archives, hosted a “GLAM Boot Camp” in DC. GLAM is an acronym for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. They announced it months in advance and I reserved my room and booked my travel as soon as dates were posted, but I failed to recognize that the event was supposed to be for registered attendees and in the end I showed up without an invitation. Fortunately there was not a problem with space although it could have been tight. I already knew half the people who attended and the other half I wanted to meet.
Kevin Gorman (user:Kevin Gorman) I had known from the Wikipedia Education Program as he relieved me from my commitment to manage classes in California. Pat Earley (user:The Interior) was a friend from Vancouver who I had met because of his involvement in planning the upcoming incorporation of an independent non-profit to manage the Wikipedia Education Program after the Wikimedia Foundation discontinues hosting it, as it plans to do with most community programs. Jason Moore (user:Another Believer) I had met at an editathon in Portland and we had collaborated on other projects since. Emily (user:Keilana) I had known from the education program as she collaborated with another friend, user:Biosthomers, in assisting a molecular biology class and at the conference I came to know that I would be seeing her again at Wikimania. Ed (user:The ed17) edits the Signpost. Alex (user:Sadads) lives in Kansas and is known in the Wikimedia outreach community as being beacon for the central US Wikipedians, and I had met him at Wikimania DC. His girlfriend works for an organization which does building material safety evaluation and we talked about collaborating with Consumer Reports, Wikipedia, and his organization somehow. David (user:Neelix) had recently become a coordinator for the education program in Eastern Canada and was a cheerful person I was happy to meet in any case. Nikki (user:Nikkimaria) was another Canadian whom I had not met. Chris (user:Klortho) worked at NCBI and I had not met him only because he was not so active on-wiki. He worked with Hilda at NIH and was friends with Doc James and Daniel Mietchen. Jake (user:Ocaasi) is my friend in Philly who does new user outreach. Jen (user:Calliopejen1) lives in Los Angeles and already knew my friend Adrienne there, so I was happy to meet her and have another Wikipedian in LA. She gave me contact of her boyfriend who is a composer, and she herself does law. I had met Chris (user:Theornamentalist) at Wikimania DC and he is as chill as a person can be. Andrew (user:Fuzheado) was there and he has always been very good me. James Hare (user:harej) was there as an event organizer – I think he is great but he is a bit of a pessimist and told me not to come to the event because there would be no room. When he told me this it was the night before and I had already traveled to DC and checked into my room, so I came anyway and there was no problem at all.
For just part of the event Doug, (user:Doug) was there and at dinner I talked with him for hours about the problem of sharing entire books online and best practices for storing digital versions if distribution is the goal. User:Jarekt gave an insightful presentation on the problem with Wikimedia’s category system and that led some of us to develop an essay called Beyond Categories.
It was extremely useful to me to have some face-to-face time with all of these people. Most of us stayed in the same hostel. I am sure that good collaborations will result because of this meeting.