I just love the sound of this project. I wish I could help with translating interfaces into he: or ar:, but unfortunately I cannot speak those languages. I wish them the best of luck. This is exactly the kind of project that could get people curious about free licenses; the urge to share family history (old documents, letters, photos, and in the case of Israel precious war and pre-war photos) can be quite strong.
--Maria
User:Arria Belli
On 8/7/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher@gmail.com> wrote:
==Project with Wikimedia Israel==
I spent some time talking to a lovely chap named Dror (User:Drork) who
describes himself as the "foreign minister" of the Wikimedia Israel
chapter. Their chapter is planning to start a big project with another
company in Israel to ask people to look for historically significant
images in their private collections and donate them to the public
domain. (Israel is having some anniversaries so it is timely for
them.) He basically wanted to know that such images would be welcome
in Commons. I said of course! Then we discussed about how the images
should be collected. We decided it would be better if the images were
submitted to a gateway before being added to Commons. The organisation
that he is working with is willing to write the open source SW to
collect all the structured data that they want to collect (and also
deal with hebrew, arabic etc interface stuff which we do poorly at
best). So the idea at the moment is that their partner org will write
this interface, we will install it on the toolserver, and from there
it can be appropriately formatted etc and go into Commons.
So we have quite a few toolserver users working for Commons, that
won't be a problem I think, just thought that was a pretty cool
project. They plan to run a pilot project and if it's successful (they
don't know what kind of stuff people will even submit), then a full-on
project may run for like a year.