This is a brief report from the FLOSS Conference in South Africa that Erik and I attended this week. A more detailed version is on Meta at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005; so please read that one instead if you have time.

I was invited to give a presentation about the Wikimedia projects at the international "Free/Libre and Open Source Software" (FLOSS) and Free Knowledge workshop in Pretoria, South Africa. Erik was given the opportunity to hold a workshop there about wiki technology. The byline for the conference was "Knowledge for all, Education for all", so the Wikimedia projects fitted in perfectly.

The first day was made up of formal presentations. A list of these is on Meta. My talk was part of a "Digital Commons" panel. Much of the second day was divided into two workshops, including Erik's. The theme of Free Knowledge Communities was discussed on day 3, and there were many areas in which Wikimedia projects could collaborate with existing initiatives, and new ideas for using Wikimedia content:

* Spoken Wikipedia by cell phone. Many areas of Africa have high cell phone coverage with access to SMS. Teemu Leinonen of the University of Art and Design Helsinki is working on a project to allow a user to send an SMS with the article title to a phone number. A few seconds later, they get a call on their cell phone with a (usually machine-generated) spoken version of the article they requested. * Wikipedia in schools. Static HTML dumps on DVD, offline applications that allow editing, and update feeds like rsync to maintain offline copies, were all requested by people working on getting Wikipedia into schools. Where people were interested in print projects, they wanted to focus on printing out particular topics, rather than having a copy of the entire encyclopedia. * Wiktionary. There is a need for a repository of legal terminology in the 11 official languages of South Africa since courts often rely on untrained interpreters who need a reference guide for dealing with unfamiliar terminology from any of the languages they were not native speakers of. * Wikibooks/Wikiversity/E-learning. With the price of textbooks much higher in South Africa than in developed countriesfree textbooks are of extreme importance, and Wikibooks could provide the content needed for initiatives to deliver this. We discussed our existing and potential future projects at length and talked to proponents of various e-learning initiatives.

Again, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005 for details on any of these issues.

==Meetup==

On the evening of the third day, the first African meetup as held in "Cafe 41". Four Wikipedians from South Africa participated: Laurens, Alias, Renier Maritz and Andy Rabagliati. Renier's wife also joined us, along with some people from the conference. We discussed ways to promote the Afrikaans Wikipedia, methods to distribute Wikipedia to Africa, localization of the interface, and possibilities for e-learning.

==Future conferences==

Several upcoming conferences were mentioned as being of possible interest to Wikimedia. Most notable of these are WSIS (http://www.itu.int/wsis/;), which I believe Jimmy and Yann may be attending, and the World Conference on Computers in Education (http://www.sbs.co.za/wcce2005/;), for which no Wikimedia attendance is currently planned.

Unfortunately, we did not see much of South Africa beyond the conference centre. Nevertheless, the visit was very productive and led to many new contacts and insights. We aim to follow up on the discussions, and turn some of the ideas above into reality soon.

Angela.