Yearly Report 2010
Events and Activities
March: Participation at the Wikimedia Conference
The Wikimedia Conference is an annual meeting of the Wikimedia Foundation's developers, sysadmins, the MediaWiki community developers and Wikimedia chapter representatives. Manuel, Asaf, Pascal, Fabien and Tomasz participated in the meetings and set up a working group called "Wikimedia Offline". There we met people from PediaPress and started to think about integrating ZIM into the Extension:Collection which is currently used for the book printing capabilities of MediaWiki.
Due to this working group - which happened to be dominated by people that are already working with openZIM - many relevant and interested people could be convinced that ZIM is the superior toolkit and format for offline content. Tomasz presented the decision of the Wikimedia Foundation to use ZIM for dumps and offline products in the future. This was a very helpful statement, in front of the other developers and admins.
June: Participation at LinuxTag
LinuxTag is Europe's biggest exhibition and conference for free and open source software. openZIM applied for a booth in cooperation with tntnet, so we got one booth for both projects.
By this opportunity we created nice graphs to show how the ZIM file format is used and how it works internally. These were printed as A2 posters and showed at LinuxTag.
For details see http://openzim.org/LinuxTag_2010.
August: Participation at Wikimania
Wikimania is the yearly conference of the Wikimedia community. Every year it takes place in another area of the world - in 2010 it was Gdansk in Poland.
Apart from other offline projects and topics like the selection project WP1 or the Malayalam CD initiative, openZIM was presented and a demonstration of an usage of the standard implementation was made using Kiwix.
October: 4th Developers Meeting, Finalizing the ZIM Format
We met us in Strasbourg (France) during 2 days for the fourth time to speak about many technical topics related to openZIM. New binding in Python and demo of a first client for Android were the most important moments of the meeting. We also make more clear a few aspects of the format and how we should use it.
Ralf Schmidt from PediaPress visited our meeting for one day to learn about zimlib and discuss possibilities to integrate it into the Collection extension of MediaWiki. The result of this first meeting and coding was a working binding of Python using zimlib. This way PediaPress can easily use zimlib directly in their Python-based MediaWiki conversion toolchain.
Christian Pühringer from Austria participated for the first time at an openZIM meeting. He has developed WikiOnBoard, a ZIM reader for Symbian. During the meeting he showed us a prototype of WikiOnBoard running on Android. The remaining problem is that WikiOnBoard uses Qt, which is available on Symbian, but not on Android. So far a hack is needed to install Qt on Android. WikiOnBoard needs support for multitouch devices to keep up with new smartphone models. Therefore the openZIM has decided to sponsor such a phone - based on Symbian - to Christian for further developments.
For more details details http://openzim.org/Developer_Meetings/2010-2
Media Coverage
After a very good start and a lot of attention due to our Wikipedia DVD the numbers of visitors, visits and page views decreased slightly but remained stable. The monthly hits remained on the same level though while the traffic increased by 50%! Now there are about 2'500 (3'000) unique visitors, 4'000 (5'000) visits, 20'000 (28'000) page views and more than 50'000 (50'000) hits per month, in average 0,75 (0,5) Terabyte of traffic each month. (Numbers in parentheses are numbers of 2009.)
See detailed statistics: https://intern.openzim.org/awstats/awstats.pl?config=www
Blog Posts
Several blogs had posts about using Wikipedia Offline in African countries, with the use of Kiwix and openZIM.
- 2010-10-25 Project for Kenyan Schools
- 2010-09-16 Wikipedia Goes To Africa -- Israeli Students to Leave for Humanitarian Work in Africa, Equipped With Portable Static Wikipedia
- 2010-03-01 Kiwix install at Kwena Malapo school Johannesberg
Gadgets
- Linux.com published on March 26th a review on the Ben NanoNote, which comes with vido / qvido, a preinstalled Wikipedia Offline reader based on zimlib.
A Review: Ben NanoNote Gets Small with Embedded Linux "...A wide variety of user applications are under development by the community, including some that lean towards embedded device usage (such as the Rockbox digital music player and Vido offline-Wikipedia reader)...."
- Christian Pühringer joined our team and developed Wiki on Board, a ZIM reader on Symbian.
Budget
Wikimedia CH generously continued and increased its sponsorship of openZIM with now 9'000 CHF. This money was spent to run a server for the project providing a technical infrastructure (CPU time for ZIM file creation, download area, version management software, bugtracker, wiki, website, virtual machines with other operating systems etc.), for Developer Meetings and the participation at important conferences such as the Wikimedia Developers Conference in Berlin, Wikimania in Gdansk and LinuxTag, Europe's largest open source event.
As openZIM is exclusively run by volunteers openZIM tried to cover most costs for meetings including accommodation and catering for all participants. Travel costs, though, have been paid by the participants.
| Date | Subject | Amount EUR |
|---|---|---|
| 2010-01-07 | openZIM Server 2010-01-01 - 12-31 rgs4617 | -600,00 EUR |
| 2010-05-08 | Wikimedia Conference 2010 Accommodation | -208,00 EUR |
| 2010-06-13 | LinuxTag 2010 Accommodation | -508,25 EUR |
| 2010-06-13 | LinuxTag 2010 Local Transport | -78,60 EUR |
| 2010-06-13 | LinuxTag 2010 Dinner | -56,50 EUR |
| 2010-06-13 | LinuxTag 2010 Social Event | -20,00 EUR |
| 2010-10-11 | Symbian Phone User:Cip | -471,90 EUR |
| 2010-10-31 | Developer Meeting 2010/2 Accommodation, Meeting Room and Catering | -1040,00 EUR |
| 2010-10-31 | Developer Meeting 2010/2 Dinner | -140,20 EUR |
| 2010-12-16 | openzim.org Domain 2010 | -12,00 EUR |
| Sum in EUR: | -3'135,45 EUR | |
| 2009-01-01 | Wikimedia CH Sponsorship | +9'000,00 CHF |
| Rest in EUR: | 5'864,55 EUR | |
See the full budget at http://openzim.org/Budget_2010.
Outlook for 2011
Roadmap
- ZIM export in MediaWiki
- MediaWiki extension
- dumping process on download.wikimedia.org
- more readers on more platforms
- Kiwix (Mac OS X)
- Wiki on Board (Android)
- Documentation
- ZIM v.5
- provide a description for publishers of the whole dumping process
- category handling
Events and Marketing
- Wikimedia Conference, Wikimedia / MediaWiki Developers Meet-Up (March)
- LinuxTag (May)
- Developer Meeting during Wikimedia Developers Conference and Wikimania in Haifa, Israel (August)