[Foundation-l] Report to the Board (March)

[mike.lifeguard]

-----Original Message-----
From: Sue Gardner [mailto:sgardner at wikimedia.org] 
>It will also help support the expansion of outreach 
>initiatives such as Wikipedia Academy, and the distribution of 
>educational content from Wikipedia and its sister projects in 
>non-web-based formats such as DVDs and books, to reach people who are 
>not online.
----


I'm glad to see this mentioned in your report, as I've wondered for some
time what initiatives the Foundation is taking to expand our impact beyond
the internet. If our mission is to bring the collected knowledge of the
world to everyone (or however you parse it), then we have to recognize that
the internet is a limited means to do so, and we'll need to do much more
beyond it to reach that goal, or anything close to it.

"...And so if you think about what [that goal] means, it means a lot more
than just building a cool website; we're really interested in all the issues
of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to
have the information that they need to make good decisions. And so we're
gonna have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the internet..." [1]

The last time I mentioned this, I was pointed toward localization of
MediaWiki as one way we're doing this... I don't see how localizing a
website reaches beyond the internet. To be fair, there have been efforts in
the past to actually go beyond the internet:
*I think we had some partnership with OLPC [2] at some point; that might
have been Wikibooks-specific [3] (and it might be simply a free association
of volunteers with nothing higher-level happening)
*There are other groups who print (on paper/CDs/DVDs) Wikipedia content, but
are not involved with us, so far as I know

I haven't seen the Foundation take the lead on anything of the sort until
now. If I'm just not seeing it, feel free to turn this into a learning
opportunity for me, as I'd be interested in getting involved if there are
things happening that I've missed. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing where
this leads, now that we have some funding.

In particular, the Wikibooks project and it's Wikijuior "sub-project" are
excellent candidates for publishing, for obvious reasons, and I hope the
various language communities of Wikibooks in particular will put some
thought into how they can effect the goal of reaching "beyond just the
internet."

Mike.lifeguard

[1] TED Talks. Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/37
[2] http://laptop.org/
[3] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wikibooks