All,

I'm very happy to announce that the Ford Foundation has awarded a $300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve our interfaces and workflows for multimedia uploading. Press release here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Ford_Foundation...

For the first time we're also sharing a full grant proposal, with permission of the Ford Foundation. You can find it here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f9/WMF_Ford_Multimedia_Pa...

It should give you a good idea about what we can do within the scope of this project. As a brief recap, Michael Dale has already done some good work on external repository searches and transfers, and integration of uploading into the editing UI, so we're hoping to build on top of this to really get the workflow for licensing/upload/review/embedding of media files nailed.

We've also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia chapters about possible models for working together on the execution of this. For example, we want to make sure that we can facilitate fruitful face-to-face meetings with Commons practitioners, and there is plenty of technical work to be done that can be decentralized and shared. Exciting projects like Wikimedia Germany's investment in multilingual search are already underway, so hopefully over the next year, we'll see lots of useful activity culminating in genuine improvements for Commons and beyond.

Big thanks to Sara Crouse and Naoko Komura for their work on this grant proposal, and of course to the Ford Foundation for funding it. :-) Wikimedia Commons deserves to grow to many more millions of free educational media files, and hopefully this strategic investment will help us to get there.

All best, Erik