Hi Robert, thank you for the information. I'll contact these people as soon as I am back in Italy. Of course I understand that there are no real project leaders, but normally there is a group of people that knows more about a certain project and they can more easily create the right contacts than for example I could do - or they can help directly by telling what is needed and how things are supposed to be done. I will also have a look at the German wikiversity as soon as possible. Thanks again! Best, Sabine ..... ___________________________________ Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB http://mail.yahoo.it

Sabine Cretella wrote: At the moment we are decentralized, disorganized, and have no authority from the Wikimedia Foundation to proceed in English with Wikiversity at en.wikiversity.org. If you are looking for authoritative information or need to process sensitive negotiations or information your best bet is probably to contact a member of the Board of Directors. You might also point interested people at the German Language Wikiversity portal: http://de.wikiversity.org which reroutes to this apparently functional wikiversity site: http://de.wikiversity.org/wiki/Hauptseite. I do not know for certain who actually owns this domain and the servers currently supporting it. I have been assuming the Wikimedia Foundation but it seems odd that Wikiversity has been authorized to proceed in German but not English. Perhaps the German wikimedia sites are operating under different auspices than the original Wikimedia Foundation. The Board has been considering setting up a number of committees, presumably to distribute their workload and improve feedback from the informal "communities" to the official Wikimedia Foundation responsible for managing donations, the internet infrastructure, and public interface/regulatory requirements but as far as I know they have not achieved any published formal responsibilities or procedures. It is possible the Board has completed initial selection, screening and appointment of committee chairs or initial committe members from whom the chair will be selected. I have seen rumors of a "Communications Committe" so perhaps a search at the meta site created to work on project projects and organizational issues would yield something useful. There is an active help desk (I usually check it at least once a week) at the Wikiversity School of Engineering but there is very little activity there, presumably because we are receiving very little casual or dropin web traffic. Perhaps there is such at a School of Linguistics or other applicable subjects. Links to the current temporary web space are available here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Wikiversity_Schools An option that other projects have been starting to exercise which you may wish to suggest for your serious contacts to consider is that they contact their local information technology support people about setting up a local wikimedia environment and then link to it from the appropiate point in the link mazes or learning trails we are developing. As long as they use a compatible license template there should be no trouble forking, merging or shifting material appropriately as policy issues are sorted for the various sites. Some participants do not welcome blatant attempts to merely divert local web traffic to commercial endeavers. Such links may be deleted as spam or left in place until local materials or policies regarding spam links evolve; what occurs is currently dependant upon the preferences of individual participants who encounter the link. There is also a for profit organization owned, at least in part, by a couple of members of the Wikimedia Foundation Board where some prototyping regarding collaboration on FDL'ed educational materials and public/peer reviewed publishing for Academics has or is taking place. http://academia.wikicities.com Some particpants at Wikiversity including myself have been discouraging participation at wikicities.com until the Board authorizes the English Wikiversity link en.wikiversity.org in accordance with the expressed intent of aproximately 69% of about 300 votes regarding the Wikiversity project. Others, including some of our best qualified academics feel it is an appropriate place to experiment with the paradigm. http://education.wikicities.com/wiki/Wikiversity#Wikiversity_Core_Courses_I… Sorry we have no better answers for you. The technology and paradigm has awesome potential but it fizzles fast when potential participants cannot agree on common goals or trust that there is a stable namespace or server to deliver their efforts to the rest of the planet. What point in achieving carpal tunnel syndrome only to have the material casually deleted or the servers froze from excessive demand by semantic web bots calibrating google search capability? I have encouraged a few highly qualified professionals to drop by and check us out but this has resulted in no visible participation to date so I have abandoned it for the moment as counterproductive. This may provide a clue as to how your colleagues will perceive the site unless you adequately prepare them for an experiment still undergoing initial development discussions. Perhaps you should suggest to your candidate participants that we are still prototyping and if they would like to get in on the ground floor and help establish workable policy and a favorable climate for their goals then they should browse around and either contribute something or drop messages or questions on other participants talk pages. Alternatively they could get a feel for online collaborative processes at Wikipedia.org or one of the other advertized projects at the bottom of the main entry portal pages. If they are more interested in details or effective propagation of their specific disciplines via proven methods; rather than developing and setting up the experimental online learning environments to find out what works; then it might be best to advise them to check back every year or so or run a google for forks or competing paradigms that they may find more suitable or usefully active in a stable, reliable, trusted namespace applicable to their interests or field of expertise. I hope this was helpful. Sincerely Michael R. Irwin http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User_talk:Lazyquasar