I would like to welcome you all to BlogFest.Asia 2012 on the behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland. We are very glad to have this opportunity for outreach at BlogFest.Asia and are thankful that our Cambodian friends and organizers were very willing to have us partake over here.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit charity organization based in San Francisco, California that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and other sister projects. The Wikipedia encyclopedia is the largest encyclopedia in the world and is accessible online by anyone with an Internet connection free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation promotes the use of free content around the world, and we encourage our readership to give back to our community of editors and volunteers by sharing their time and knowledge for the benefit of the entire world.
My colleague Vantharith Oum from Phnom Penh and I will be presenting the Wikimedia point of view on 3 October 2012 to interested participants at BlogFest.Asia. Please check the following link for the program schedule: http://2012.blogfest.asia/program
The first session from 2.00pm to 3.30pm on 3 November 2012 will be in the Khmer language and it will be hosted by Vantharith Oum. The second session from 3.35pm to 4.35pm will be hosted by yours truly in the English language. The aim of both the sessions will be to create awareness about the Wikimedia universe and our online projects. We will also specifically focus on using and contributing to the Wikimedia Commons, one of the largest repositories of free licensed media around the world. Some of the content of our workshop will also include discussions on copyrights, the Public Domain, Creative Commons and other forms of free licensing.
Since many of you will be visiting the ancient town of Angkor today, that is, 2 November 2012, I would like to request you to please take as many good pictures as possible from the perspective of uploading them to the Wikimedia Commons later at our workshops. Your pictures may be utilized on Wikipedia articles about the culture, heritage and history of Angkor and Cambodia, and will potentially be accessed by hundreds of thousands (and even millions) of people around the world.
Please follow the link below to learn more about the process:
We will be around and available at BlogFest.Asia to meet and discuss with you if you have any questions related to Wikimedia. We thank you for your time and look forward to meeting you at BlogFest.Asia 2012!
Sincerely yours,
Anirudh Bhati
Skype: anirudhsbh