Notes from Wikimania
We’re Just back from Alexandria, from Wikimania 2008, and it was a blast.
Over 650 people from over 40 countries came, of which –it was very encouraging to see– about half were locals.
Wikimania
Kaltura was proud to be a sponsor of this important event where the Wikipedians of the world united for three days to talk about anything and everything Wikipedia.
It was a wonderful opportunity for us to engage community members that have participated in the collaborative video beta project that we launched with WMF in January, and to meet new ones.
( You can download the Kaltura_wikimania2008 _slides from a short presentation we gave)
Most importantly, it was a good chance to meet all the people involved in the next phase of the project, and to announce the fact that Kaltura will be sponsoring Michael Dale’s work.
Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki, with a rich user interface built entirely on open standards like Ogg Theora. Michael’s work priorities will be coordinated between Kaltura and WMF.
Michael Dale is currently a Research Associate at the University of California Santa Cruz and the lead developer for the MetaVid project. MetaVid is a community archive project for public domain US legislative footage. The MetaVidWiki software (which runs the archive) is a free software extension to MediaWiki that enables community engagement with audio/visual media assets and associative temporal metadata. Michael has been involved free & open media adoption on the web in collaboration with the xiph.org and annodex organizations.
We’re excited to be moving forward, and can’t wait to have a 100% free software implementation that will pave the way to add video to every page on Wikipedia.
Stay tuned for updates, more pictures and videos coming soon…