Hello,
I will be next week at a workshop in Pretoria (South Africa) to present our projects, and more precisely Wikiversity.
The workshop is funded by CSIR, South Africa's largest Science and Technology Research Organisation.
This meeting is the second of a series of three workshops. The first occured last april, with Angela and Eloquence being the invited speakers. I will participate to the second next week. The speaker at the third meeting (november 2005) is not confirmed yet, but is likely to be Mav.
Why not the same person each time ? Well, I was interested in going to this second meeting as I wish to explore paths for more involvement from african editors. It was already the topic of my talk at Wikimania. I would gladly have participated to the third workshop, but by then, I won't be allowed to travel so far anymore. Angela will be busy at another conference. Mav appears to be a good choice, both as an officer of WMF and as someone who has been interested in Wikiversity pretty early on.
During the first workshop, I understood Angela mostly presented our main projects, our principles, wiki editing ... Erik presented MediaWiki and likely, development directions. During that meeting, the idea came to make a grant proposal related to Wikiversity. The second workshop will be focused on paths of collaboration with regards to tertiary education, hence the presentation of Wikiversity and what it could be. Given what Angela and Erik presented in last april, I intend to orient my presentation in two directions, one being the Wikiversity concept, and the other being the Foundation itself (in particular to present the organisation and the different actors which might be involved in the next few months). The next workshop will probably focus on making the idea a full grant proposal. If things proceed well, I hope I can participate from home :-)
Some useful links provided by Angela : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Free_Knowledge_Communities (quite a bit of information in various format there) http://internal.wikimedia.org/wiki/FKC_and_MobiLed (mostly stuff written by Kim since the first workshop) http://www.free-knowledge-communities.org/ (includes details of the first workshop)
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I will welcome any input from those interested by Wikiversity in the next few days. Please do so by email (anthere9 AT yahoo.com) or in the relevant wiki pages. I am sure it will be most helpful to me :-)
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From a more practical perspective... TRAVEL
I will be in Pretoria on tuesday morning (the 20th) and will leave on saturday evening (the 23rd). This should leave enough time to organise a lunch or dinner with wikipedians over there. I'll post about this as soon as I find the relevant meeting page on the english wikipedia this evening.... (if anyone does before me, please feel free to take care of it :-)) I have a hell of a work at my job these days, school started again for my kids, so I have a little bit of difficulty to manage it all smoothly.
----------------------- Another practical perspective....TRAVEL I am living in a very remote city... and quite naturally, the airplane network is such that when coming back from to the southern part of Africa... to get back to middle of France... I have first to go rather north... that is, in Amsterdam (Netherlands) (more than 1000 km north of my city. No comment....).
Worse, I'll have a more than 9 hours break before going back home. This will be on sunday the 25th. I should be there in the morning on sunday. And have a plane at the end of the day. Any idea of what I could do in beautiful Amsterdam during a september sunday ???? I'll post about this on the dutch wiki this evening as well ;-)
Cheers.
Anthere
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