[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] We should permit Flash video playback

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On 7/22/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
>
> You ask for examples of organisations that I had in mind when I wrote about
> partnering. Here are some, there are many more.

<snip long list of projects we could be tangentially involved with>

> With organisation like the FSF and the Creative Commons we already have many
> links. Several of our people are involved with them. Organisations like
> these provide a global role, there are many organisations that provide a
> similar role on a national level. The Dutch chapter for instance is working
> with national organisations to make people and organisations more aware
> about issues like copyright and licenses. We ask for material that is
> currently lacking in the Dutch Wikipedia. It is the partnering of many
> organisations that to will make this a success.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the meaning you attach to "partnering".
Some of the above (including the ones I snipped as marginally relevant)
we should certainly outreach to, and help them use our content. Projects like
FSF and CC certainly don't match our goals in a way that could permit
anything that might be termed "partnering", much less merging... For one
thing, the FSF and CC partnering and/or merging ought to come first ;-)

With FSF and CC it is definitely essential that we keep avenues of
discourse open, but I would certainly be wary of going whole hog and
partnering or merging with either of them. AIUI CC is itself self-limiting
itself from doing anything active in any sphere where wikimedia is
doing stuff, except perhaps in the legal sphere, anyway. In an ideal
world it would be nice if wikimedia foundation could facilitate better
interoperability between these two licencing juggernauts of course ;)

>
> These are many organisations we could collaborate or partner with. I do not
> know any organisations that we should merge with, I think this would only
> becomes clear when we build a working relationship. When we find that
> activities have an overlap that make the continued existence of activities
> in both organisations redundant, we could merge the activities. This might
> lead to a merging of organisations but this would only become clear in time.

Again, I don't think I would be quite so bold as to speak about partnering, much
less merging. Co-operating and helping other projects is well and good.
Partnering requires a bit more. People have talked a lot about how lucky
we are to have the Kennisnet connection. It might be useful to the discussion
to define clearly what our relationship with them is. In that case I personally
think the best way to describe it is indeed partnership. I would be very
interested to hear what the experiences with Kennisnet have been like, and
how the relationship is projected to develop in the future. I could be very
wrong, but it appears to me from the outside that Kennisnet still has its
own independent mission, and merging it to wikimedia simply is not in the
cards in the foreseeable future.

--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]