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Posts Tagged ‘Wikimedia Foundation’

Open Microblogging Service Hires Former Creative Commons Strategist

An all-star team is forming at StatusNet, the open microblogging service for businesses and communities. The newest addition is Jon Phillips, former community and business development manager for Creative Commons.

Phillips joins Brion Vibber, who came from the Wikimedia Foundation where he served as chief technology officer.

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The news is significant as it reflects the interest in open-source alternatives to the proprietary microblogging services that currently dominate the market in the consumer and enterprise communities.

According to their web site, StatusNet makes sites that use open-source software to create and distribute open content. The company also provides professional support contracts and customization for companies that use StatusNet software on their own servers for intranet or Internet microblogging.

identi.ca, the open network micro-blogging service is based on the StatusNet tool.

Phillips and Vibber join a team led by Evan Promodou, the founder of StatusNet, whose previous work included creating the Open Content travel guide, Wikitravel.

Phillips, who is an avid microblogger (@rejon) writes on the StatusNet blog:

I’m super enthused about the direction Status.Net is heading as a free network service, as a business, and as a leader in software and culture with a focus locally on niche communities on scaling internationally (more on that soon). Right now, we are working very hard towards some big releases slightly under the radar with the push towards Status.net hosted services and Status.Net 1.0 software.

Phillips says he will help with some large projects Status.Net is building, including an upcoming relaunch. He will be there to help ease some of Evan’s work load so he can be freed up to be “uber-CEO rather than having to wear 50 different hats.”

According to the bio on his blog, Phillips worked from 2005 to 2008 building the community and business development strategy for Creative Commons. Phillips “worked with hundreds of businesses through Creative Commons 50+ international jurisdictions to integrate Creative Commons licensing, and managed globally successful projects such as ccSalons, the Case Studies, Metrics, and CC+ projects. He recently completed the special project, the Public Domain Wiki, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation from Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, Access Copyright, and Internet Archive.

Pretty impressive.

We expect some major pushes from the open-source microblogging community. Phillips arrival is a sure sign that major efforts are underway to make StatusNet a leader in this realm.

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Wikipedia’s Parent Org Gets $2 Million Grant From eBay Founder

The Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic and investment organization, announced today that it will give the Wikimedia Foundation, parent organization of Wikipedia, a $2 million grant over the next two years.

At current spending levels, Omidyar will be contributing just over 10% of WIkipedia’s full expenses. The Foundation has been concerned about the global economic climate’s impact on donations and is about to enter into a major new period of its history in which the free-form editing of Wikipedia will be slowed by a new approval process that’s long been expected.

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Former eBay exec turned Omidyar partner Matt Halprin will become the 9th member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. Halprin doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry and the Omidyar Networks’s “may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards.”

Wikimedia said in its annual report that it plans to spend a total of $9.4 million over the 2009-2010 year. Just three years ago, in ‘06-’07, the organization spent only $3 million. Back in the old days of ‘04-’05 it cost just $100,000 to run everything.

Wikimedia joins a long list of organizations in the Omidyar portfolio, including well-known Web 2.0 names like Digg, Seesmic and the Sunlight Foundation.

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Wikimedia Celebrates Hewlett Grant

The Wikimedia Foundation just emailed ReadWriteWeb to announce receipt of $500,000 in grant funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The grant is a part of a $100 million dollar program to fund open education resources, and given Wikimedia’s mission to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, the Hewlett Foundation couldn’t have chosen a better org.

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Wikimedia has contributed to open education in a number of ways including by providing full courses and textbooks through Wikiversity and Wikibooks and a number of learning resources and commons material through Wikisource and Wikicommons.

Three days ago the organization celebrated Wikipedia’s 3 millionth English article and 2 days ago it launched its official iPhone app. In a week of landmark announcements, the company has managed to charm the Hewlett Foundation and kick start its strategic planning process.

“The Hewlett Foundation’s support comes at a critical time,” said Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director Sue Gardner, “We’ve just begun the planning that will help us identify how to maximize our impact around the world. This support will help us to execute our priorities for the current year, and enable us to plan for the future.”

In true crowd sourced Wikimedia fashion, the organization launched a public wiki for community strategic planning. To add your input in how the community is shaped in the next 5 years, visit the Call for Proposals page.

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Wikimedia Foundation creates official iPhone app

Filed under: iPhone, App Store, iPod touch, App Review

The Wikimedia Foundation has just released a free app for accessing the web based encyclopedia right on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Wikipedia Mobile [iTunes link] brings the full boatload of Wikipedia knowledge to a nicely formatted iPhone screen. In my tests, it responded quickly, and without any glitches over Wi-Fi and the 3G network.

The only issues really are that there are already dozens of similar apps available for the iPhone. In fact, if you go to the Wikipedia site in Safari things are nicely optimized for the iPhone screen. Of course the app has a built in history button, but Safari does too.

Some of the other Wikipedia apps I’ve tried are Wikipanion [iTunes link], which has more features, including changing the font size, and Wikiamo [iTunes link] that allows landscape view, reading of saved material offline, and links to other languages.

I’d like to see the ability to email entries to myself or others, and the Wikipedia Mobile support page just goes to the home page of Wikipedia. That’s not too helpful.

One other odd thing. When trying to install the software on a first generation iPod touch, users are reporting it fails with an error message saying a microphone is needed. Huh?

However you access it, Wikipedia is a great resource, and the Wikimedia Foundation says it will be updating the app frequently based on user requests. The current version is 0.1, so I think this app is just getting started.

TUAWWikimedia Foundation creates official iPhone app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wikipedia Lauches Official iPhone App

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the popular Wikipedia, just released its first official iPhone application for Wikipedia. Wikipedia Mobile, which is available for free in the App Store now (iTunes link), gives users access to iPhone-formatted Wikipedia articles. The truth, however, is that this isn’t a very good application and doesn’t really go beyond anything the regular mobile Wikipedia website doesn’t already do. Indeed, the app is basically just a wrapper for the mobile Wikipedia site.

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There are already a number of very good Wikipedia apps out there, including Taptu’s Wapedia (iTunes link), Wikiamo (iTunes link) and Wikipanion (iTunes link). The official Wikipedia app doesn’t add anything new here. While other apps at least include features like the ability to easily browse tables of content for apps and include in-page searching or the ability to save posts for offline reading, the official Wikipedia app doesn’t feature any of these functions. The only ‘advanced’ feature in the app is its ability to track your browsing history.

Of course, this is only a first attempt and we laud the Wikipedia Mobile team for releasing this app as an open-source application. However, the fact that the search field is populated with “::Home” when you first open up the app shows that the app still needs a lot of polish before it can compete with the ‘unofficial’ apps. For now, if you just want a lightweight way of accessing Wikipedia articles from your phone and you don’t want to install an app, just use the official mobile site.

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