The Big Fat Brussels Meeting is an opportunity for Wikimedians, mainly from Europe, interested in how public policy may affect the Wikimedia movement to get together and collaborate. I have been to these before and, as usual, it was both productive and inspiring. In particular, I led the discussion around what we first, very ambitiously, called PD Gov (as in government material should be public domain), but later crystallized to something much more narrow and easier to work on.

Reuse of material from the European institutions

Since 2011, there is the 2011/833/EU: Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 on the reuse of Commission documents which is already quite good and has led to clarity around of a lot of the content created by the European Commission. During the meeting, we thought it would be a good first step to try to get this decision widened, to apply to all the European institutions. By doing that, we don’t need to come up with new policy language that needs new arguments. Instead, we can simply argue for consistency and to reuse the reuse policy. This would still be a considerable win, as a lot of relevant material is created by the European Parliament and especially their Research Service. Do reach out to me if you want to help work on this.

Wikipediapodden podcast episodes

Besides partaking in the meeting activities, I also managed to record three short interviews that are now available as podcast episodes on Wikipediapodden.

The first one is with Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov and focuses on the meeting itself: Episode 205 – big fat advocacy.

The second is with Franziska (Ziski) Putz and focuses on #advocacy in the Wikimedia movement: Episode 206 – managing advocacy.

The third one is with Gonçalo Themudo and focuses on Wikimedia Europe, the newest entity in the movement: Episode 207 – meet Wikimedia Europe.