Hello everyone,

About the Offline UserGroup

There have been many efforts to distribute offline snapshots to places with little connectivity, via schoolservers, wikireaders, and pocket-sized servers that run on batteries. 

• We created a static content initiative early on;
• An offline mailing list has been around for many years;
• Kiwix has provided a stable toolchain for creating and viewing offline snapshots;
• At various times (2011-12, 2016-) the WMF has staffed or supported offline teams testing and developing toolchains for translation and article selection, including one simply called "Offline".
• A number of community grants from WMFR, WMDE, WMF and other foundations have supported offline deployments and focused translations for that purpose.

This user group is a shared community for people using the mailing list and developing any of these related initiatives!

Objectives of the UserGroup

+ Consolidate and support offline snapshots of wiki knowledge, and deployments of them in schools, clinics, and rural communities.

+ Update and maintain the offline projects portal here on Meta.

+ Advocate for better distribution of and awareness of offline wikis, in all parts of the world where internet access is restricted, expensive, or unavailable: including schools, clinics, prisons, refugee camps, disaster areas.

Activities

• Development of offline distributions with Kiwix
• Support for editors compiling modern snapshots of wikipedia, such as WP 1.0
• Offline distributions to rural clinics, schools, and libraries
• Offline editing with WikiFundi
• Development of synchronizing solutions
• Past events: 2017 offline hackathon in NY
• Future events: Offline meetup @ Wikimania, Kiwix hackathon

 
Membership

Following the last update during Wikimedia Summit regarding WMF board seats selection [1], the UserGroup needs to clarify its membership.
For those already members in 2018, please confirm whether you are still a member of the Offline UserGroup in 2019.
If you were not yet a member and want to be, add your name ;)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_for_offline_wikis#Membership_in_2019

Anthere