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)
-------------------
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 :-)
------------------------
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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