Wikimedia France and the Wikimedia Foundation are currently considering the idea of a multimedia-focused workshop and planning event to take place in October 2009. Rather than an open community conference like Wikimania, this would be a workshop targeting skilled practitioners who want to help transform our approach to rich media throughout the Wikimedia universe.

This event will most likely happen in France, as Wikimedia France will be providing logistical support and most of the funding, with a goal to ensure that the most relevant people can be present at the event.

One of the key objective of this meeting would be to help inform the recently funded Multimedia Usability Project to improve the usability of Wikimedia Commons. This meeting should help to immerse the project team in the complex world of multimedia in Wikimedia projects today. It should also help to start building a core group of volunteers as well as chapter support for the project.

Beyond the Multimedia Usability Project, we're hoping that useful practical discussions will lead to outcomes positively driving approaches to sharing and collaborating multimedia in the Wikimedia universe forward.

We're thinking of a three-day event with a group of 30 people total, who could receive travel scholarships if they don't have any other organizational funding support. The meeting could potentially be divided into three tracks: technology, content partnerships, and community practices. Participants would be a combination of people directly invited because of their known high value contributions, and people applying or being nominated.

We're currently envisioning that the tracks could be structured as follows:

* Technology track: This would include hammering out specs and code for key technological improvements deemed necessary for rich media in WMF projects in areas such as upload usability and workflow, search and tagging (including multilingual search), permissions workflow, deletion workflow, and so forth. It could also address next-generation technologies such as video editing tools, as well as operational issues associated with large scale content delivery.

* Content partnerships track: This would look at best practices, and could perhaps be used to hammer out a "content partnerships manual" for working with institutions as in the case of the German archive partnerships. It could also be used to prioritize partnership opportunities.

* Community practices track: Here we would discuss constructive ways for the Commons and local project communities to interact, existing deletion and arbitration practices, legal issues with different types of media, and other day-to-day issues that Commons community members deal with.

Ideally the outputs of the process would also feed into the Wikimedia Foundation strategy planning process. This workshop is not designed to address "content creation" questions, i.e., how to shoot a good photo, how to restore an image, etc. It's intended to identify practical solutions and approaches for challenges in the above three areas.

Please give us your feedback

* Does this basic division make sense? Might another track setup be more helpful? * In the above tracks, which other issues should be addressed? Which issues should be avoided? * Any other comments and suggestions welcome.

Also, if you'd like to participate in such an event, or if you want to nominate someone else to do so, feel free to send us an initial note. We may decide to not hold the event, or to alter its shape, but a provisional expression of interest will help us plan. Currently we're holding October 9-11 as the dates.

Please leave comments on the talk page here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Usability_Project_Meeting_October_...

Or if you want to express interest privately, please e-mail both me and Delphine Ménard:

erik@wikimedia.org delphine.menard@wikimedia.fr

Thanks! Erik