Hello
Last week, I attended Wikimedia France General Assembly, which was
followed by some interesting discussions. And the Offline UserGroup was
actually nominaly mentionned as one of the contentious UG for the future
WMF board elections. Contentious because it is a transversal thematic
organisation, where most members are also likely to be members of other
UG and/or chapters. There are also such UG, such as WikiWomen, Art and
Feminism, Whose Knowledge etc. though a strong minority in the 100 UG.
So, what's the deal....
Recently, the WMF has approved the fact all UserGroups will participate
in the election of WMF board seats. The next occurence will be in a few
weeks.
This include our UserGroup.
As part of the currently discussion, it is suggested that it would be
highly inappropriate that people vote or even discuss in several UG,
when they are members of several UG/Chapters.
It is also considered that the UG should have a public clear process to
make decisions as it would not be okay that contact groups choose
nominees and vote nominees without getting members feedback. It also
raises the issue of why contacts are contacts precisely and what their
roles and responsibilities are. It is also suggested that UG could also
decide not to vote on the WMF board elections if they chose not to
participate. But on one hand, group members should decide that, and on
the other hand, offline UG could provide a relevant input to the
discussion (the largest majority of UG are defined by their geographies,
and there are not so many UG that are defined by their activity focus...
so strategically speaking, I think the Offline group should speak up).
I'd like to note that, at this point, Offline has two parallel
membership lists... not a big deal, but probably something to clarify at
some point.
Additionaly, at some point, our UG will have to submit an annual report.
This is mandatory to stay a UG. I do not know when the deadline is...
perhaps our current group contacts do.
And last, I'd like to raise the issue of our contacts precisely. The UG
was created nearly a year ago, using the opportunity of the Berlin Conf.
Thank you for those who made it happen !
Yet, the UG contacts were self-appointed, rather than selected by the
(vague) members (that was completely logical given the situation, I do
not criticize this process). Today, it would probably be more
appropriate to have contacts who are chosen by members and to have
contacts that are actually *active* in the UG.
At the moment, one contact is active, whilst I have never heard anything
from the second. Well, I met him once at Wikimania, but I have never
seen him active either on this list, or on the wiki (he did not even
list his name himself, Sj did it for him).
Being an affiliate comes with some obligations (even if they are very
very light). And it also comes with some benefits (even if it is not
entirely always clear which they are).
I know we are part of this group mostly because we are simply sharing a
belief that offline is part of our mouvement and benefit the global
community. Some are mostly observers and supporters, whilst it is a
daily job for others. We can not meet very often (contrariwise to
geographically-based UG), and we have to thank those who made it
happened that offline members meet, such as after Wikimania Montreal.
And I am sure most of us would agree that this is what the role of the
UG should be. Sharing info, common opportunities, and so on.
Yet... an WMF affiliate has some obligations... so how should we deal
with that in the least time-consuming, least-bureaucratic,
least-expensive way, yet playing our role in representing, recruting and
promoting offline in the mouvement ?
Flo
Hello everyone
Shani just invited anyone interested on how the UserGroups are going to
participate in the upcoming WMF board of trustees election process to
join a Telegram group.
Anyone from usergroup is invited to join if interested. You will find
the link below.
Cheers
Florence
-------- Message transféré --------
Sujet : [All-affiliates] A Message to all User Groups Representatives
Date : Sun, 31 Mar 2019 12:08:10 +0200
De : Shani Evenstein <shani.even(a)gmail.com>
Répondre à : Wikimedia Affiliates <all-affiliates(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Pour : All Affiliates ML <all-affiliates(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear all,
Continuing the process of "on boarding" User Groups to participate in
the upcoming election process (which started here on this mailing list
and continued in the WMSummit in Berlin), we have opened a telegram
group for User Groups.
The main purpose of the grouo is for you to have a platform to ask
questions relevant pnly to UGs, brainstorm together on how to engage
your communities, or just share you thoughts (and frustrations ☺).
Here is a link to the new Wiki User Groups Affiliates group. So if you
belong to a User Group, please join the group and introduce yourself -
https://t.me/joinchat/Ee0ANBOp0AuT48mFpNweqg
Please note that more than one person can join the group (unlike this
maing list), so please share it with your communities. The more, the
merrier. ☺
Cheers,
Shani.
Hi
Yesterday, in our MWoffliner 1.8.0 release announcement email, I have
written about the first libzim official binding of the openZIM project:
node-libzim. What I don't have written is that this has been made
possible by the previous release of libzim 4.0.5 a few days ago.
We release usually new versions of the libzim time to time. Releases
which - most of the time - contain minor changes (at least from the user
perspective) and mostly used within our openZIM & Kiwix projects.
Therefore, we don't make a lot of publicity about them. But, this
maintenance release is a bit different.
For the first time, we have released binaries and headers for GNU/Linux
x86 64 bits. You can find them here:
https://download.openzim.org/release/libzim/. It is now easy to build a
binding without any hard compilation work, that's what we have done for
node-libzim.
This is only a first step, we need to go further to offer better
opportunities to developers of scrapers. We want in particular to:
* Provide libzim binaries for MacOS (and why not for Windows)
* Provide a libzim binding in Python (we have a lot of scrapers in Python).
Volunteers are really welcome to help make this possible. This would be
extremely helpful to provide more & better scrapers.
Regards
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
Hello
All right. I am fairly available this month so I do not mind. Please add
me to the list.
Then before next summer (so basically Wikimania roughly ?), we need to
figure out report+contacts+members
Flo
Le 13/03/2019 à 17:59, Samuel Klein a écrit :
> Gabe: great first logo! Let's use it.
>
> Florence: I do not have access to the chapter wiki. We were just all
> added to a mailing list, and invited to appoint 2 people from each
> user group to join the list. Then I believe the list will together
> come up with a proposed mechanism for nomination, which will be
> reviewed by the WMF Board within 2 weeks. Would you like to be added
> to that list?
>
> I will forward the last email on the topic that I've gotten. I am
> willing to be the other person from WOW, but this is a busy month so I
> would also be glad to see another person step up.
>
> Warmly, SJ
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 3:15 AM Florence Devouard <fdevouard(a)gmail.com
> <mailto:fdevouard@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Hello
>
> Le 04/03/2019 à 20:30, Samuel Klein a écrit :
>> For group contacts + reports : It would be good to have an
>> annual nomination thread, and short wiki vote, a few months
>> before our annual report? (/August/ each year)
>
> Ok. So we could put that back on the table around May ?
>
>
>> That way we can use the same energy to summarize what's been
>> happening; those involved in active projects should feel welcome
>> to be liaisons; and we keep the meta pages up to date.
>>
>> On board voting:
>
> For information, the signpost (well, Bluerasberry) has published
> this that is worth reading:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2019-02-28/In_fo…
>
>
>> + Arranging private votes has been a perennial weakness for the
>> movement. Would others be interested in public discussion of
>> pros/cons of different candidates?
>
> For information :
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats
>
> Ok, vote is one thing. Nomination is another.
>
> So to start with, I am not sure what is currently the process for
> nominating candidates...
> Apparently, voting takes care on the ChapterWiki, which is a
> private wiki (I suppose that Sam has access to it... do you Sam ?)
> I presume that nomination process also takes place on the
> ChapterWiki ? Can you tell us if that is the case Sam ?
>
>
>> + I respect the concerns around voting multiple times: we want
>> people to be comfortable joining many groups while only voting
>> once. Is there any proposal yet re: how to do this?
> Unclear
>
>> + Say that, per Nemo, only incorporated groups vote in the final
>> selection. Perhaps we could share formal recommendations with
>> that group, before their vote (and sort those out on Meta).
>
>
> As said previously, ALL groups can vote. It is not restricted to
> incorporated groups.
> But indeed, we can also simply choose to NOT vote. But if so, this
> is something we should explicitely decide.
>
> I vaguely feel that what we should do is
> 1) participate in the nomination process (IF we have a name to
> propose and IF it is not in the current list - if list there is...
> so first thing would be to figure out where the nomination list
> would actually be...)
> 2) not participate in the vote (because it is unclear who our
> membership is and it is likely many of us are in other groups)
>
> What about starting by polling our "members" on a wiki page about
> how they feel about the offline group actually trying to vote for
> someone ?
>
>
> Florence
>
>
>>
>> SJ
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 9:39 AM Federico Leva (Nemo)
>> <nemowiki(a)gmail.com <mailto:nemowiki@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for raising the point.
>>
>> Florence Devouard, 27/02/19 14:17:
>> > Yet... an WMF affiliate has some obligations... so how
>> should we deal
>> > with that in the least time-consuming, least-bureaucratic,
>> > least-expensive way, yet playing our role in representing,
>> recruting and
>> > promoting offline in the mouvement ?
>>
>> From my point of view as a supporter of offline projects,
>> the ideal
>> solution is that all affiliates agree that only incorporated
>> entities
>> will have a formal vote (whatever its weight) in the final
>> phase of the
>> selection of 2 board seats, to avoid creating new unwanted
>> work about
>> internal governance.
>>
>> Alternatively, a simple method might be to decide that all
>> user groups
>> will have a discussion/vote on a certain wiki page where all
>> their
>> members can join (Meta-Wiki may be enough if it can be
>> public), so that
>> it's easy to identify unwanted patterns. (And establish a
>> quorum or
>> whatever other criteria is decided.)
>>
>> Federico
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Offline-l mailing list
>> Offline-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> <mailto:Offline-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617
>> 529 4266
>
>
>
> --
> Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
Hi
We have published a new version of MWoffliner: the MediaWiki scraper.
Version 1.8.0 is - like always - available here:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/mwoffliner
This new release contains big improvements in term of performance.
MWoffliner 1.8 does not require anymore zimwriterfs binary and can write
directly on-the-fly offline ZIM files. This means far less mass storage
usage and a number of IO accesses divided by around 5.
Here is the detailed changelog:
1.8.0:
* UPDATE: Write ZIM files directly (Using Libzim) #184
* UPDATE: Removed 'tmp' files and directory #448 #575
* UPDATE: Removed --deflateTmpHTML and --tmpDirectory arguments #575 #576
* UPDATE: Implemented better request backoff #496
* UPDATE: Change file names/paths #278
* UPDATE: Removed --writeHtmlRedirects argument #506
* UPDATE: Removed --localMCS option (automatically detect) #490
* UPDATE: Updated documentation #423
* FIX: Other stability, logging and error handling fixes
All of this has been made possible because a new software piece in
openZIM portfolio: node-libzim. node-libzim is a JavaScript/NodeJS
binding of our ZIM format reference library: libzim. It allows quickly
to read/write ZIM files directly in JavaScript. The code is available in
our code forge at https://github.com/openzim/node-libzim and of course
available at npmjs.org: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@openzim/libzim.
This is the third milestone of a few we have planned with the support
of the WMF. Next one on the list is 1.9 and is planned for end of April.
With 1.9 we want to implement the full support of MediaWiki categories.
Like always, PR and bug reports are welcome at:
https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner
Regards
Emmanuel
--
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication
We should identify the people who will be WOW liaisons for this voting
process, to María S. //SJ
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Erica Litrenta <elitrenta(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 6:11 AM
Subject: Re: [All-affiliates] Again, welcome.
To: Wikimedia Affiliates <all-affiliates(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi Shani and all!
Here's an attempt at clarifying information I've sent before:
There are currently 4 people volunteering for being facilitators (listed at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2019#20…!
). Facilitators are an important part as they help all eligible affiliates
to participate if they so choose and also serve as liaison to the
Foundation’s own board liaison on ASBS, María.
So first thing should be to identify the Liaison with María. Then someone
else should be appointed as their "deputy
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deputy#Noun>" to be available in case the
liaison becomes unavailable due to real life priorities or other issues. I
have pinged the people
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Affiliate-selected_Board_…>
who already volunteered to be facilitators to remind them that this is the
first decision you'll take and they hence should help you make speedily.
If I'm allowed to chip in my 2c: this could be as easy as someone saying
"I'm gonna be that person if you don't mind". The main reason why I
recommend such an approach is that we have a very, very tight timeline
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2019#Te…>,
in which deciding who's going to be that person isn't by far your most
complex task ;)
As you may have noticed, I have issued a call yesterday in the hope that
more people join the facilitator group, because if we had 3 people when 40
entities could vote... so with anywhere between 100 and ~130 affiliates it
is probably important to have at the very least a couple more to ensure the
facilitating volunteers aren’t overextending themselves!
However, I don't know how long it can take for people to decide to step up,
so it appears desirable that this first decision is taken already in a day
or two.
When you consider that the Board is supposed to approve a new agreement on
the process as established by all of you in 10 days or something, then you
can see how facilitators will be key into expediting things until the most
critical phase that you'll face, which is finding and discussing your Board
candidates based on the profiles people identify as desirable in Berlin and
beyond!
HTH.
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