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
Hi,
I just want to say I'm still alive. But I had a very busy last year and had no time to do anything for openZIM. But it looks like this year might get easier for me and I am willing to spend some time into further development of zimlib.
Tommi
On 02/05/2012 12:33 PM, Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
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
dev-l mailing list dev-l@openzim.org https://intern.openzim.org/mailman/listinfo/dev-l
Very good to hear!
My suggestion is to have a meeting at LinuxTag in Berlin this year (May 23rd - 26th). I am currently trying to set up a joint booth of the german-speaking Wikimedias (AT/CH/DE) which could act as a showroom for openZIM (and other projects).
As Emmanuel already indicated I have no budget for 2012. As the project appeared dead it didn't make sense to me to just put down numbers and going to find a sponsor when we don't even concluded on what we want to do 2012 and there is no security that the sponsor's money would actually being used to make progress in the offline project.
This means I can't provide travel costs for a trip to Berlin. On the other hand I assume that Tommi will be there anyway with his tntnet project and Emmanuel might want to help on the Wikimedia booth as a representative of Wikimedia CH.
Any comments?
/Manuel
how much budget would be reasonable for this year? On Feb 6, 2012 7:41 AM, "Manuel Schneider" manuel.schneider@wikimedia.ch wrote:
Very good to hear!
My suggestion is to have a meeting at LinuxTag in Berlin this year (May 23rd - 26th). I am currently trying to set up a joint booth of the german-speaking Wikimedias (AT/CH/DE) which could act as a showroom for openZIM (and other projects).
As Emmanuel already indicated I have no budget for 2012. As the project appeared dead it didn't make sense to me to just put down numbers and going to find a sponsor when we don't even concluded on what we want to do 2012 and there is no security that the sponsor's money would actually being used to make progress in the offline project.
This means I can't provide travel costs for a trip to Berlin. On the other hand I assume that Tommi will be there anyway with his tntnet project and Emmanuel might want to help on the Wikimedia booth as a representative of Wikimedia CH.
Any comments?
/Manuel
Regards Manuel Schneider
Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge www.wikimedia.ch _______________________________________________ dev-l mailing list dev-l@openzim.org https://intern.openzim.org/mailman/listinfo/dev-l
Hi,
I agree that - while pretty stable - there is still some room for improvement of the zimlib. E.g. better tools, incremental updates (very nice, although also quite a challenge regarding provisioning of the updates). Furthermore, a location based index would be very welcome (To allow finding articles close to a location).
Regardless of this, I still believe that the most critical point for the continued success of the zim format, and offline wikipedia in general, is to have an automatic wikipedia dump in place. See Emmanuel's proposal (http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Mediawiki_DumpHTML_extension_improvement). I'd really hope that this can be implemented in the course of this year.
I very much appreciate if there is a zim-meeting this year. Even so I cannot promise yet that I can attend a zim-meeting at Linux-Tag in Berlin. Anyway, I'd acclaim if we find a sponsor, who covers parts of the travel costs.
Regarding my work on zim mobile phone apps, these are my planned next steps:
1. Release WikiOnBoard 2 for Symbian^3 Basically finished, except for translation. Should be available in Nokia Store in the course of this month. Main difference is the significantly improved user interface. See http://cip.github.com/WikiOnBoard/ for some screenshots.
Note, that this new version has basically been created in the course of the attempt to implement a Meego version of WikiOnBoard. While there is basically a working Meego Version as well, it has some major usability issues (i.p. scrolling in article) which I cannot fix with reasonable effort. Therefore unfortunately I've currently no plans to release a Meego version.
2. Wikipedia-Android-App-Zim-Support I did some work on this last September. As now the official Wikipedia-App is released, I think it's a good moment to continue working on the zim integration. In addition I hope that there will be an english wikipedia zim dump without pictures available soon (Emmanuel, any news on this topic?). The picture loading performance issue is then much less relevant. However, I hope that I can find a solution for the picture performance at least for Android 4 ICS.
Best regards, Christian