[FM Discuss] back from wikimania

Wed Aug 8 00:46:57 PDT 2007

hi adam

thanks for this report, sounds like a really constructive time -
what's taipei like? - n who r u talking with about hindi localisation
btw?

:)
.sophea

On 08/08/07, adam hyde <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
> hey,
>
> I just got back yessterday from Wikimania. The jet lag is still
> lingering, but a few gins on the plane helped me with adjusting to the
> timezones so I'm in not too bad shape.
>
> The event was pretty amazing. I will write up a really detailed report
> of it and post it here and on the FM news blog. I think also all talks
> are going to be put online in audio and video although I am not sure
> when.
>
> So, for a quick report - the event was very focused on all things
> wikimedia (the umbrella foundation for wikipedia and its associated
> projects - wikimedia commons, wikiversity, wikibooks etc -
> http://www.wikimedia.org/)  and mediawiki (the mediawiki tool that the
> fouundation uses for all its projects - http://www.mediawiki.org/).
>
> The first day had some excellent speakers
> (http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule). Every presentation
> was very informative and some very inspiring moments. Lawrence Liangs
> presentation about the 'authority of knowledge' was a highlight for me
> on the first day. He spoke about how wikipedia could learn from the
> demise of manuscipt culture at the birth of the print age. As I
> understand it at the start of the print age, printed books were
> considered as the most recent release of a body of work, and updating
> these works and feeding into the content cycle of a book was common. As
> an example Liang used Chaucers Canterbury Tales. The works were updated
> by many people and were living breathing entities, however when he died
> the works became his canon and were considered in some way 'frozen' by
> the academics. Any edit of the text after his death was seen as
> producing a defective edition. So the 'authoritative' point (the
> canonisation of Chaucer by Academics) killed off the participatory
> culture surrounding his texts. Liang was pointing this issue at
> Wikipedia and the debate surrounding how Wikipedia might be striving to
> attain an analogous 'authoritative' position. His point, I think, is
> that the pursuit of wikipedia towards being an 'authoritative knowledge
> object' is less interesting (and potentially troublesome as it may deter
> contributions) than the methodology for creating knowledge that
> wikipedia has established.
>
> Also on the first day was Masayuki Hatta, another excellent talk. It was
> small but on the button. Masayuki is a debian hacker from Japan, and he
> was talking about the troubled Free Documentation License (FDL) that the
> wikimedia foundation uses for its projects. He argues that the license
> is inappropriate (many people at the event agree with this position) and
> suggested that there is a big problem with changing the license because
> under the FDL the person that created the document holds the copyright
> and only they can relicense the content. We went through this process
> too with fm a few months ago and thankfully everyone agreed to change to
> the GPL. Evan Prodromou (http://wikitravel.org) suggested it might not
> be necesary to get everyones permission as there has been several large
> open source projects that have changed licenses without getting
> permission from all contributers - an interesting point, but I think
> that if Wikipedia did this it would be followed by a great deal of
> controversy as consultation and 'doing things the right way' (not just
> the expedient way) seems me to be regarded very highly in wikimedia
> projects. So Masayuki, being a hacker, suggested a hack to get out of
> the license. He suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation send an envoy to
> the Free Software Foundation to speak to the redraft of the FDL
> currently underway. Masayuki had been involved in a similar process for
> the GPLv3 and said he was surprised that the FSF actually listened and
> made some notable changes as a result.  So, Mayasukis hack included
> lobbying the FSF to make the FDL compatible with other licenses (such as
> some Creative Commons licenses) - this would allow for license
> interoperability between the FDL and other licenses but also it would
> allow for content currently covered by the FDL to be distributed under
> the compatible license. This in effect opens a backdoor for the
> Wikimedia foundation to slip out of and ditch the FDL in favour of
> something more interesting.
>
> I found this a pretty interesting strategy and Mayasuki and I will start
> a mailing list to kick start this process.
>
> There were many other really great panels and presentations. Magnatune
> (http://magnatune.com/) presented their interesting sales strategy for
> CC licensed material. Essentially you can download the music for free of
> buy it for a price you are happy with. This was interesting and I will
> think of this further while I write the financial sustainability plan
> for fm this month.
>
> Dominic Chen presented the c-shirt project which allows you to remix a
> t-shirt design from cc licensed material and they print out a t-shirt
> for you. I made a pretty clumsy t-shirt from a road sign that said 'gpl'
> and the wikipedia definition of floss. It was admittedly a pretty geeky
> design, but I really appreciated the c-shirts attempts to make this
> whole world of open licenses live beyond the screen.
>
> I met some very cool people at the event and I found the 'wikimedians'
> very supportive of non-wikimedia/non-mediawiki projects. The feedback
> for what we are doing was immensely positive. I had taken a roll-up
> banner to present fm with (will put some photos up), and printed some
> 'free manuals for free software' t-shirts, had postcards, businesscards,
> stickers, and buttons, and copies of the printed Audacity Manual...plus
> I did 4 presentations of fm - 2 'poster sessions', 1 lightning talk, and
> one workshop.
>
> The feedback on the design was huge. The buttons were so popular they
> ran out in the first day. The stickers got stuck to everything from
> laptops to the t-shirts of volunteers. I had a few people come up and
> say the logo was 'hot'...hehe!...so, I think we can pat Lotte on the
> back (I'll do it in about 30 mins when she wakes up ;).
>
> I had many people wanting the Audacity book, I didnt have many so I was
> a bit hesitant to hand them out as it was good to have them to show
> people what kind of work we are doing.  I gave 3 away and will send
> another 4 to people that are interested.
>
> There was interest about the remixing function from quite a few people.
> Christoph Sauer from WikiCreole (http://www.wikicreole.org/) took a very
> close look at it and was very interested in how we did it and which
> libraries we used etc. Also, Kim Tucker from the Meraka Institute in
> South Africa was very interested in the HTML export functionality and
> said he will be in touch to explore how we might work together.
>
> 2 discussions have begun to translate FM - into Hindi and Chinese.
> Frankisy has emailed me a few times and he is forming a crew and a plan
> to begin the Chinese translations.
>
> A few people asked me about which manuals were available and I was happy
> to talk to a few people specifically about the blender manual and the
> forthcoming puredata manual. There is also interest in a fast forward of
> a Gimp manual (which I am working on today) and Inkscape manual, to
> perhaps assist people who want to contribute content to wikimedia
> commons. There are alot of other discussions to follow up such as the
> possibility of hosting a mediawiki user manual on fm, fms involvement in
> the one laptop per child documentation writing, a jumpstart in the
> mplayer manual (which needs a lot more content in my mind) and many
> other threads.
>
> So, it was excellent for fm to be there and I can't really overstate how
> proud I was to be presenting us there. Being at Wikimania not only
> opened my eyes to a lot of what is going on in the wiki world, but it
> opened others eyes to the great job we are doing, and it reinforced my
> belief that we are on the right track and doing a great job.
>
> So congratulations to everyone :)))
>
> We also have some new members to this list who I met at the
> event...welcome!
>
> I will write up a full report. I have some jet lag to get through and a
> huge to-do. Tomorrow I also go to Croatia for a week. I will use it as
> an opportunity to write up the report and also to focus on the financial
> sustainability plan for fm.
>
> So busy busy...
>
> :)
>
> adam
>
>
>
> --
>
>
> adam hyde
> floss manuals
>
> free manuals for free software
> http://www.flossmanuals.net
>
> mobile : + 31 6 154 22770 (Netherlands mobile)
> email : adam at flossmanuals.net
>
>
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