Template:2023 speaker details/CH9NPN

Rainer Halama - Wuselig

I was born in the Swabian Region of West Germany in 1957 I was ripped from this idillic life in 1970, when my father took his family of three to India where he was in charge in setting up a joint-venture company for the production of radio parts in Coimbatore. As a thirteen year old I experinced the full culture shock. I went to boarding school in Kodaikanal at an American Highschool that just at this time was in the transition period from beeing a school for the kids of American missionaries to the renowed International School that it is today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodaikanal_International_School). The unique learning experince there, the international diversity of the student and teacher body and the integration of the local enviroment, history and culture into the school curiculum probably made me the Wikimedian I am today. After three years my father was asssigned to Singapore. There I graduated from Singapore American School in 1974. In Singapore I was already old enough to roam about the city on my own, or travel with friends from School or on official School excursions up the west and east coast of West-Malaysia and to Sumatra. Returning to Germany I experienced reverse culture shock. I only learned about the concept of TCKs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid) years later. I finished my German Secondary School, did my military service and studied Generals Economics at Tübingen University, with a two semester stint at the State University at New York followed by a three month trip through the USA and Canada, mostly hitch-hiking. I worked in diverse jobs as Export Manager, Key Account Manager, Sales Manager, tried running an independant sales-representation for a while. Married late, divorced soon, got a depression, found Wikipedia. Trying to illustrate my own articles, I found back to my old hobby photography. As a photographer I become involved in the Wiki loves.. Contests and also in Jury and organization work for these. Mainly via Wiki loves Monuments I also got into touch with the GLAM community. And trying to perfect the description and categorisation of my uploads, I got involved in Wikidata. I have organized local meetups, GLAM-events and aespecially at the later ones was dissapointed that they were mostly one-time highlights, with for the most part, no continuity, or built up of lasting relationships with these institutions. I asked myself, wether we as Wikimedians, for all the effort the institutions put in regarding, time and human ressources, really gave anything back to the institutions. Did we just click photoes of their exhibits and dump them in Commons, or where these photos of any use for future research in AND outside of the Wikiverse? Wonderful projects, like Coding da Vinci have evolved in the meantime. If we manage to also cooperate accross our own projects, transfer that know-how into the GLAM-Institutions, demonstrate to the institutions, that by collaborating with us, they can broaden their outreach and also find new research tools via structured data, we still can accomplish a lot. This is my goal as a “Kulturbotschafter”. Today I live in a stable relationship with a partner that doesn’t do any active editing, but found a niche as juror in Wiki loves … contests and is very tolerant ans supportive of all the time I put into Wikimedia projects. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/2016_06_25_-Wikimania_2016-086%28cropped%29.jpg (Marco Calvo, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)