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home · blog · an update from heather ford: what's been happening in november?
An update from Heather Ford: what's been happening in November?
| Jimmy Wales with Wikipedia Academy participants, by Jimmy Wales |
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We had a jam-packed month at the iCommons office yet again!
Last week we hosted Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia and iCommons board member for a number of activities to launch the Wikipedia Academies in Africa in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. Frank Schulenburg of Wikipedia Germany, Ndesnajo Macha, dubbed the ‘Father of Swahili Wikipedia’ and Ian Gilfillan (a.k.a. Greenman), a local Cape-Tonian Wikipedian, all visited us in Johannesburg to start this exciting project to help students and faculty in universities throughout Africa learn how to use Wikipedia to share and build African knowledge and culture.
On Saturday morning, the team gathered at CIDA City Campus in Johannesburg to start the Academy. CIDA is a very special university because it is the first free university in South Africa, and was started as a humble project by the visionary Taddy Blecher who was at our event to welcome us.
Although Zulu and Xhosa were the most widely spoken languages among the students whom we were working with to show how to edit local language Wikipedias, we had students from at least six of South Africa’s official languages at the workshop. They were really excited to learn how easy it was to share knowledge of their cultures – not only easy, but empowering too.
The next day, we heard from a bunch of Afrikaans Wikipedians about their hopes for building Afrikaans Wikipedia, and about some of the challenges and successes during the six years of their existence. Laurens Cloete, one of the stars of Afrikaans Wikipedia, talked about the need to build the community of contributors, and about how to help out in growing smaller South African Wikipedia language communities – as he did last weekend.
Our final event for the week was a new event that we’ve launched in South Africa called ‘The Innovation Series’ where we are partnering with local business and media to discuss new ‘sharing’ approaches to Web 2.0. Jimmy Wales was a hit with the 130 people who attended the event, and did a great deal to spread the word about the Wikipedia Academies.
In terms of iCommons’ strategy, last week’s events were the start of a closer relationship with a community who we see as a major stakeholder in the global commons arena. We’re thrilled to have co-sponsored the event with the Wikimedia Foundation and are looking forward to further partnerships with them in the future.
That’s it from me. If you’re in the Bay Area around the 30th of November, please let me know (we’re having a party… AGAIN!) I’ll also be speaking at the i4d film festival in Malaysia on the 9th of December if anyone is going to GK3 and wants to get together for a drink or two.
Best wishes,
Heather
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Great work on the Wikipedia Academy. I didn't know there were so many official languages in South Africa.
Kiruba Shankar · Chennai (India) · 27/11/2007 01:49
your call: is this comment useful?