Dear everybody,

I have some news regarding WLPA that I would like to share with you! We are broadening the focus of the contest a bit and I think that this change might make it a bit easier to get more volunteers interested (I believe so because the change involves GLAMs - and we all loves GLAMs, right :).

Here's the thing, recently there have been discussions both in WMSE (about the rather unclear Swedish FoP-law), in Europeana (with how we can get a clearer connection to GLAMs), and most importantly the discussion on Wikimedia Commons regarding the potential risk of having photos of modern art being deleted.

Because of these discussions we in the international team have come to the conclusion that also Public Domain artworks in GLAMs and paintings should be included in the WLPA photo contest as many (most?) of those can be considered publicly owned and publicly accessible, i.e. being public art. This change will increase the amount of PD artworks that are included in the contest (i.e. that are completely safe from deletion on Wikimedia Commons), make it possible for countries without Freedom of Panorama to participate and take better use of Europeana's expertise and continue to deepen the Wikimedia movement's cooperation with GLAMs. Yesterday Europeana agreed on this change.

It will however be up to the national teams to decide if you would like to add museums into the mix and which ones that you believe have suitable collections and should be included or if you would like to focus on artworks that are outdoors. I would be happy to assist you as much as possible and discuss this further and how to do this the best; and I also hope that Europeana will be able to assist us with contact details and so forth.

I hope that this change perhaps will make it more interesting for some of you or your volunteers to participate and encourage you to contact people that you might think would be interested in helping out! There is still 3,5 month left and the international team is eager and capable to help you get started! I would also like to stress that to do smaller pilots of the contest would be super cool as well!

Kind regards,

John
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John Andersson
Wikimedia Sweden
Event Manager Europeana Awareness

Phone: +46(0)73-3965189
Email: john.andersson@wikimedia.se
Skype: johnandersson86

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