Dear openZIM hackers,

our project is little bit in hibernation. Although the growing interest
for offline readers and offline free storage format, only a few things
were achieved on our side in 2011.

In 2011, we made our openZIM meeting during Wikimania in Haifa and the
majority of the audience was composed from new-comers. The consequence
was that we did not have spoken a lot about tech. but more about offline
in general. So this was a successful first offline meeting, but not a so
successful openZIM meeting. In the future, we will have certainly
different meetings for general offline discussions and for technical
ones. On the reader side, Kiwix had in 2011 around 150% of growth,
wikionboard was released in the Symbian app. store, we have the
prototype of a decoding library in Java. pyzim is in prod. on all
Wikimedia Web sites (in the Mediawiki:Collection extension).

So the format is really successful an helps every days thousands of
people to access to Free knowledge offline. This show us that both, the
format and the reference implementation are good. Does it mean that we
have finished? Do we still have features to implement? What should we
do? What are our available resources?

Currently, the situation is like following: we still have things to
implement in the zimlib which are described in the format like native
category handling or templating. We also have long standing things to
implement like everything necessary to provide efficient incremental
updates (zimdiff/zimpatch). Around the format we should also work on the
packaging and provide additional tools like for example a php binding or
a binary to transform a static directory of HTML in a ZIM file (without
using a DB). I'm sure this list is not exhaustive.

Like we can see, the problem is not the work to do. The problem is on
the side of the resources. Manuel & Tommi had/have both less available
time for openZIM and they were both the key people for logistic and code
writing. On the accounting side, WMCH, which was our traditional
sponsor, asked us to find other financial sponsors.

On my side I have more time than in 2011 and I proposed myself to help
Manuel in the organizing work ; I could also certainly do part of the
coding work. Christian is also there and continues his work on mobile
readers. We could alos find new external contributors - on a paid or
volunteer base. On the financial side, I think that if we have a clear
project and reasonable wishes, we could certainly get help from the WMF
or Chapters.

I think, it does not make sense to keep costs running and project open
if nothing happens. So wee need to discuss, take decisions and make next
step.

Your opinion matters, please share it!

Regards
Emmanuel