[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Wikipedia Invites Users to Take Part in Open, Collaborative Video Experiment

[Erik Moeller]

On 1/18/08, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm disappointed to see that the Wikimedia foundation has yet again
> missed an effort to use its viability, both internally to the
> community and externally, to promote pre-existing community driven

As has been pointed out many times, there is no exclusivity here. Just
last December, Sue & I allocated a substantial piece of our
Wikiversity presentation time at Stanford to let Michael Dale talk
about MetaVid; we're hosting it in our SVN repository, and I've also
offered that we would endorse grant proposals or be happy to support
the project in other reasonable ways. It's not mature enough for real
world deployment on WMF sites; nor is Kaltura.

I'm not going to argue with you about the technical merits of either
approach. There's no point in doing so: I am happy to let the open
source ecosystem compete for the most viable solution. Your arguments
regarding volunteer time are questionable at best; people will either
choose not to participate for the reasons you've given or others, or
if they do, then we can assume that they have made up their own mind.
We're quite transparent about what Kaltura is and what it isn't.

Putting out a press release and inviting users to participate in an
external beta test in order to incentivize open source and open
standards within previously proprietary technology is a perfectly
reasonable thing to do, and I'll be happy for us to do it again if and
when the opportunity arises again. It's in line with our mission and
our values: free culture is an open movement that reaches out to
others, rather than excluding them, in an effort to transform society.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not an isolationist organization. We don't
want to be an island -- we want to be the ocean.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate