(Forward from the Wikimania 2008 program committee)

The Wikimania 2008 program committee is proud to announce the program for Wikimania 2008. Wikimania 2008 includes over 80 sessions from the Wikimedia community, the Free culture movement and other related subjects from all over the world. During the three-day program many Wikimedia and Free Culture related subjects will be covered by a wide range of speakers. Numerous ideas and topics will be discussed. Wikimania is a great place to share thoughts and have discussions on the Wikimedia projects and values and issues that are important for Wikimedia.

These presentations, discussions and workshops are presented by experts (by profession or by experience) on their topic. The program committee would like to share some of the highlights of the Wikimania 2008 program, presented by high profile speakers with both technical and free/open culture backgrounds. Some of this year’s speakers:

- Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, speaking on the topic of communications between projects, stakeholders, and a global audience

* Eliane Metni, director of the International Education Association on The Global Educators’ Open Course, how teachers from all over the world work together on better educational material.

* Jimmy Wales – Founder of Wikipedia and Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation – will talk about freedom of speech, human rights and free culture. Jimmy Wales brings a long history of involvement in free and open culture projects created by large collaborative communities.

* Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Library of Alexandria, will speak about the future in his talk “new paradigms for new tomorrows”

* Tim Spalding – Creator of LibraryThing, a prominent social cataloguing web application for storing and sharing personal library catalogues and book lists will talk about his project.

* Multiple sessions from various Wikimedia Foundation staff and advisory board members including: Erik Möller and Sue Gardner – Deputy and Executive Director – with a forecast for the Wikimedia Foundations upcoming year; Brion Vibber – Chief Technology Officer – discussing the current state of the MediaWiki software; and advisory board members Angela Beesley speaking about how wiki’s can be used to write more then an encyclopedia and Benjamin Mako Hill speaking on the topic
of Free Network Services.

* Schuyler Erle and Mikel Maron from Open Street Map – The free editable map of the whole world, created by volunteers, will speak about their successes and methods.

The program committee is thrilled to present such an extensive program with excellent speakers, and look forward to a successful conference.<

Do you happen to have 650 GB of free diskspace? If so, you can grab a copy of Wikipedia. Don’t fret: The compressed download of all language editions only clocks in at 40 gigabytes. Thanks to our developer Tim Starling for working on this project.

As a non-profit organization and a social movement, it’s our core mission to give free knowledge away to everyone. All the text content of Wikipedia is available for free download, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. The point of offering these downloadable archives is not just to make it possible to read Wikipedia while you’re on a plane or without Wi-Fi — it’s to enable people without Internet connectivity to use our content in ways that make sense. In particular, using these copies, it becomes very straightforward to set up a copy of Wikipedia for a school or university with no or limited Internet access. And, if you’re clever, you can use the dump as a starting point to create a version running on DVDs or USB sticks. (As the download page notes, if you create a product using the “Wikipedia” trademark or logo, you need official permission from the Wikimedia Foundation.)

For the technically inclined: The static HTML dumps are an alternative offering to our XML dumps in the original wiki syntax. The key advantage is that they don’t require any additional software to be useful: You can literally simply download them (provided you can handle the amount of data) and open them in your web browser. The wiki syntax format, on the other hand, offers third party users more flexibility in the ways they want to render the output.

Go ahead and download the data while it’s fresh. And if you have interesting stories about the ways in which you’re using your static copy, please drop a note to our Head of Communications, jwalsh(at)wikimedia(dot)org. :-)

Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation<

Earlier today we uploaded the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2008/2009 Annual Plan presentation and Questions and Answers page to the Wikimedia Wiki.  These materials were approved at the June 20 Board of Trustees meeting.  They can be accessed via the Finance Report page.

Posting our plan and (hopefully) answering some of your questions in advance is part of our commitment to providing transparent information about the Foundation’s goals and spending.

The Annual Plan lays out projected spending through the next fiscal year (which for us starts today and runs the rest of the year).  The plan describes spending in our three main operational areas: technology, programming, and finance and administration.  We also introduce our 2008/2009 organizational goals, which we hope to discuss in more detail in the coming months.

For your information and awareness!

Jay Walsh
Head of Communications<