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

Sat Jan 19 10:36:48 UTC 2008

On Jan 19, 2008 9:13 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote

> 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.

I think this is precisely right. And I think this discussion we are having
here is quite decidedly useful in letting people consider on their own,
what they think about all this.

> 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.

This is a matter for every volunteer to make their own mind up about.

> The Wikimedia Foundation is not an isolationist organization. We don't
> want to be an island -- we want to be the ocean.

I'd prefer we were on a boat, with a hand on the tiller.

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