Citizen-Generated Knowledge

The role of citizen-generated information is becoming increasingly important and is providing a wealth of knowledge and data to be used by individuals and communities worldwide. In this Meetup, we will focus on different approaches to crowdsourcing knowledge, information and data.

Speakers
Siobhan Leachman, Mike Dickison, Markus Luczak-Roesch.

Markus is Associate Professor in the School of Information Management, Victoria University. He’ll be sharing results from a research project he’s leading - "Citizen Scientists in the Classroom: Investigating the Role of Online Citizen Science in Primary School Science Education" focusing on new opportunities for galleries, libraries archives and museums in leveraging the potential of citizen science in education. He’ll discuss the role of digital technologies and how we can design digital learning environments not just in schools but also other spaces where education happens (formally and informally) that purposefully bring together young learners and citizen science.

Siobhan is a digital volunteer for a variety of GLAMR institutions both in New Zealand and around the world. She’s also a wikimedian who contributes to English Wikipedia, Wikimedia commons (the Wikimedia image repository) and the Wikidata (the Wikimedia open data repository). She’ll talk about how she got started in crowdsourcing and give a brief description of her journey from helping the crowdsourcing project of one institution to now interlinking content from a large variety of institutions for the benefit of all.

Mike is New Zealand Wikipedian at Large from July 2018 to June 2019, funded by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to help New Zealand organisations and the people of New Zealand engage with Wikipedia and open knowledge. He also works with the volunteer Wikipedia community, organising meetups and running public workshops and edit-a-thons. Mike will talk on Crowdsourcing an Encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the world's fifth-biggest website; its 5.6 million articles have been edited 4.72 million times, all by volunteers - over 250,000 regular editors, and millions of casual ones (151,000 users signed up in December alone). But back in 2001, when Wikipedia started as a free, non-profit encyclopedia anyone could edit, librarians and academics laughed. How did we get here from there?

Schedule
5.30-600 networking, drinks and nibbles
6.00-6.45 brief talks from our speakers
Followed by questions
6.45-7.30 time to network with others over drinks and nibbles.

The Meetup will be preceded by an Edit-a-thon at Rutherford House, Victoria University on the topic of New Zealand libraries. For futher details please contact Anne Goulding: anne.goulding@vuw.ac.nz