The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Volunteer Coordinator. This role will be one of only eleven paid positions within the Foundation, the non-profit parent organization of Wikipedia.
The announcement says that “if you’ve devoted much of your life to the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects, and you enjoy interacting with our international community, this is an opportunity for you to turn your hobby into a profession”.
The role is about coordinating the Wikimedia committees, rather than the people voluntarily editing the projects.
See the job openings page for details.
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The WikiSym 2007 Call for Papers was released today.
Anyone who is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis is invited to WikiSym 2007!
WikiSym is the International Symposium on Wikis. The tagline this year is “Wikis at Work in the World: Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century.” WikiSym is a peer reviewed conference supported by ACM and will be held in Montreal, Canada, in October.
We are seeking submissions for research papers, workshops, panels, posters, demonstrations. I’m chairing the posters and demos part of the program. If you have any questions about these, please contact me.
Expect the same from Wikimania very soon.
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The final stage of the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2006 began today. The top eleven images (shown below) can now be voted on by Wikimedians and the winner will be selected at the end of the month. Click the image below to view larger versions of the images with captions and author details or visit the Wikimedia Commons to see the original photos and to take part in the selection of the Picture of the Year.
Update: March 2: The winner was The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, shining above Bear Lake, Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, by Senior Airman Joshua Strang.
It’s a shame the winner wasn’t a Wikimedian. My favorite was Wollex’s unique photo of the wreck of the American Star which finished in sixth place.
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The first version of the “Definition of Free Cultural Works” was released today. We have identified a minimum set of freedoms which we believe should be granted to all users of copyrighted materials. Created on a wiki with the feedback of Wikipedia users, open source hackers, artists, scientists, and lawyers, the definition lists the following core freedoms:
- The freedom to use and perform the work
- The freedom to study the work and apply the information
- The freedom to redistribute copies
- The freedom to distribute derivative works.
Inspired by the Free Software Definition and the ideals of the free software and open source movements, these conditions are meant to apply to any conceivable work. In reality, these freedoms must be granted explicitly by authors, through the use of licenses which confer them. On the website of the definition, a list of these licenses can be found. Furthermore, authors are encouraged to identify their works as Free Cultural Works using a set of logos and buttons.
The definition was initiated by Benjamin Mako Hill, a Debian GNU/Linux developer, and Erik Möller, an author and long-time Wikipedia user. Wikipedia already follows similar principles to those established by the definition. Mia Garlick, Elizabeth Stark, and myself acted as moderators, while Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons provided helpful feedback.
As more and more people recognize that there are alternatives to traditional copyright, phrases like “open source,” “open access,” “open content,” “free content,” and “commons” are increasingly used. But many of these phrases are ambiguous when it comes to distinguishing works and licenses which grant all the above freedoms, and those which only confer limited rights. For example, a popular license restricts the commercial use of works, whereas the authors believe that such use must be permitted for a work to be considered Free. Instead of limiting commercial use, they recommend using a clever legal trick called “copyleft” requiring all users of the work to make their combined and derivative works freely available.
Möller and Hill encourage authors to rethink copyright law and use one of the Free Culture Licenses to help build a genuine free and open culture.
Links:
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Wikia
WikiChix
Freedom defined
