Are you working in the OpenGLAM arena? Tweet about it!

Starting today, community members from Open Knowledge International, Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons, will be facilitating a rotating curation of the @openglam twitter account to highlight and reflect on the impact of  “OpenGLAM” (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) in their respective contexts.

OpenGLAM is a global network of people and organizations who are working to open up content and data held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. As a community of practice, it incorporates ongoing efforts to disseminate knowledge and culture through policies and practices that encourage broad communities of participation, and integrates them with the needs and activities of professional communities working at GLAM institutions.

GLAMs are powerful institutions for sharing knowledge with the world. Especially on the internet, building a practice of sharing knowledge requires adopting practices that open collections using open licensing, tools, and infrastructures. To do this work, leaders around the world have to converse, run projects, and support institutions in thinking about the larger potential of sharing their knowledge with the world. We want to use the OpenGLAM Twitter account to highlight the great work that people from different regions, linguistic communities, time zones and contexts are doing to advance openness in GLAMs.

Our approach is simple: contributors will be added to the @openglam account through Tweetdeck and will get a chance to curate the conversation coming from that Twitter account for 2 weeks. You can read the instructions for participants here. If you want to contribute, please sign up on this Google form!

Our first curator is going to be @samuelguebo, a Wikimedia community member who has been leading partnerships with libraries in Côte d’Ivoire  and will be attending Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town, South Africa this week. Do you have an upcoming event or activity that you think will spark a conversation? Contact us to become the next curator!

Curating the @openglam account is part of a broader conversation that organizations like OKI, WMF and CC are having about growing the impact of the “big open”. We hope that this curated Twitter will open up conversations about what brings us together as practitioners and enthusiasts for Open GLAM. There has been massive change in the cultural heritage sector and open communities in the past few years – the Open GLAM community is brought together by a set of principles that may need to evolve to meet these changing contexts.

We hope to hear from you soon! If you want to get involved with the GLAM at Creative Commons and beyond, please consider joining the Creative Commons Slack group.