[Foundation-l] $300K grant for Wikimedia Commons

[Erik Moeller]

All,

I'm very happy to announce that the Ford Foundation has awarded a
$300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve our interfaces
and workflows for multimedia uploading. Press release here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Ford_Foundation_Grant_July_2009

For the first time we're also sharing a full grant proposal, with
permission of the Ford Foundation. You can find it here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f9/WMF_Ford_Multimedia_Participation_Project.pdf

It should give you a good idea about what we can do within the scope
of this project. As a brief recap, Michael Dale has already done some
good work on external repository searches and transfers, and
integration of uploading into the editing UI, so we're hoping to build
on top of this to really get the workflow for
licensing/upload/review/embedding of media files nailed.

We've also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia
chapters about possible models for working together on the execution
of this. For example, we want to make sure that we can facilitate
fruitful face-to-face meetings with Commons practitioners, and there
is plenty of technical work to be done that can be decentralized and
shared. Exciting projects like Wikimedia Germany's investment in
multilingual search are already underway, so hopefully over the next
year, we'll see lots of useful activity culminating in genuine
improvements for Commons and beyond.

Big thanks to Sara Crouse and Naoko Komura for their work on this
grant proposal, and of course to the Ford Foundation for funding it.
:-) Wikimedia Commons deserves to grow to many more millions of free
educational media files, and hopefully this strategic investment will
help us to get there.

All best,
Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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