This week the Foundation is excited to be releasing four separate videos shot at the recent Wikimania Conference in Gdansk, Poland. The first video 'Username' is now posted on the WM Commons:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_User_Name_MEDIUM.ogv

Later today the Foundation will be releasing the videos on a few other platforms as well, specifically to increase public visibility: http://www.facebook.com/wikipedia http://identi.ca/wikipedia http://www.youtube.com/wikimediafoundation http://vimeo.com/wmfoundation/

I'll be posting more about the links on the Wikimedia blog later this morning (San Francisco time) blog.wikimedia.org

And maybe some others.

What are these videos? They were originally produced to complement the public outreach work going on now (and in the future) and to provide a short, energetic clip for folks to use in all sorts of presentations. A very good example of that would be in Sue's keynote presentation from Wikimania, which some of you may have seen. We hope everyone in the movement may find them useful, and we're particularly hopeful that they can be easily localized and shared even more widely. They shed a new light on the passionate people behind our projects.

Who made them? The clips were created for the Wikimedia Foundation (led mostly by Communications and Public Outreach) by a team that's been working with the Foundation over the past year. They were directed by Jelly Helm, produced by Noah Stanik, shot by DP Reed Harkness, and edited by Sarah Marcus. The music is by Portland, Oregon based musician Matt Carey. The Germany-based film production crew Living Colour was an essential partner in bringing everything together at the shoot in Gdansk, Poland, and Fenton Communications, who have been supporting the Foundation over the past year, were our agency partners in pulling this project together. We also owe the organizers of 2010's Wikimania conference a great deal of thanks for helping us sort out the production on the ground and for letting us borrow participants for short interviews.

What's next? The remaining clips will be posted on Commons and other video sharing sites through Friday. Once they're all announced we'll share another note with all of the links. You can follow the progress and hear what the public thinks on identi.ca and twitter. We hope to see the videos make an appearance in media and other blogs too.

Hope you enjoy!