Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages

By JULIA ANGWIN and GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet -- the empowerment of the amateur.

 

News Hub: Wikipedia Volunteers Quit

1:44

Wikipedia is extremely popular with the public, but not so much with the volunteers who run the site. They're quitting, raising questions about the future of Wikipedia, says WSJ.com Senior Technology Editor Julia Angwin.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

Eight years after Wikipedia began with a goal to provide everyone in the world free access to "the sum of all human knowledge," the declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia's ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy. Errors and deliberate insertions of false information by vandals have undermined its reliability.

Executives at the Wikimedia Foundation, which finances and oversees the nonprofit venture, acknowledge the declines, but believe they can continue to build a useful encyclopedia with a smaller pool of contributors. "We need sufficient people to do the work that needs to be done," says Sue Gardner, executive director of the foundation. "But the purpose of the project is not participation."

Indeed, Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Wikipedia contributors have been debating widely what is behind the declines in volunteers. One factor is that many topics already have been written about. Another is the plethora of rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe -- particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and polarizing figures.

"Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment," contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again."

Wikipedia's struggles raise questions about the evolution of "crowdsourcing," one of the Internet era's most cherished principles. Crowdsourcing posits that there is wisdom in aggregating independent contributions from multitudes of Web users. It has been promoted as a new and better way for large numbers of individuals to collaborate on tasks, without the rules and hierarchies of traditional organizations.

But as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world's largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule -- and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp.

"People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen," says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. "Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It's too many cooks in the kitchen."

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who is chairman emeritus of the foundation, acknowledges participation has been declining. But he says it still isn't clear to him what the "right" number of volunteer "Wikipedians" should be. "If people think Wikipedia is done," he says, meaning that with three million articles it is hard to find new things to write about, "that's substantial. But if the community has become more hostile to newbies, that's a correctable problem."

Mr. Wales says his top priority is to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia's articles. He's pushing a new feature that would require top editors to approve all edits before they are displayed on the site. The idea is to prevent the kind of vandalism that in January declared Sen. Edward Kennedy's death months before his actual passing.

View Full Image

Nicolas Goldberg for The Wall Street Journal

Jimmy Wales, founder of the online encyclopedia, which is written and edited by volunteers.

Mr. Wales, a onetime options trader in Chicago, founded Wikipedia in 2001 amid frustration that his effort to create an online encyclopedia was hampered by the slow pace of copy-editing and getting feedback from experts. He saw Wikipedia as a side project -- a radical experiment with software that allows multiple people to edit the same Web page. The term "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian word for fast.

The collaborative software fostered a unique form of online governance. One of Wikipedia's principles is that decisions should be made by consensus-building. One of the few unbreakable rules is that articles must be written from a neutral point of view. Another is that anyone should be able to edit most articles. One policy serves as a coda: "Ignore all rules."

The Wikimedia Foundation employs a staff of 34, mostly in San Francisco, to run the site's computers, guide its planning and serve as its public face. In its fiscal year ended in June, it reported expenses of $5.6 million. It funds its operations mostly through donations. Earlier this month, it launched a campaign to raise $7.5 million from users.

Wikipedia's popularity has strained its consensus-building culture to the breaking point. Wikipedia is now a constant target for vandals who spray virtual graffiti throughout the site -- everything from political views presented as facts to jokes about their friends -- and spammers who try to insert marketing messages into articles.

In 2005, journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. wrote about his own Wikipedia write-up, which unjustly accused him of murder. The resulting bad press was a wake-up call. Wikipedians began getting more aggressive about patrolling for vandals and blocking suspicious edits, according to Andrew Lih, a professor at the University of Southern California and a regular Wikipedia contributor.

That helped transform the site into a more hierarchical society where volunteers had to negotiate a thicket of new rules. Wikipedia rolled out new antivandalism features, including "semiprotection," which prevents newcomers from editing certain controversial articles.

"It was easier when I joined in 2004," says Kat Walsh, a longtime contributor who serves on Wikimedia's board of trustees. "Everything was a little less complicated.... It's harder and harder for new people to adjust."

In 2008, Wikipedia's editors deleted one in four contributions from infrequent contributors, up sharply from one in 10 in 2005, according to data compiled by social-computing researcher Ed Chi of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

Nina Paley, a New York cartoonist who calls herself an "information radical," had no luck when she tried to post her syndicated comic strips from the '90s. She does not copyright their artwork but instead makes money on ancillary products and services, making her perfect for Wikipedia's free-content culture.

It took her a few days to decipher Wikipedia's software."I figured out how to do it with this really weird, ugly code," she says. "I went to bed feeling so proud of myself, and I woke up and found it had been deleted because it was 'out of scope.'"

A Wikipedia editor had decided that Ms. Paley's comics didn't meet the criteria for educational art. Another editor weighed in with questions about whether she had copyright permission for the photo of herself that she uploaded. She did.

Ultimately, it was decided that Ms. Paley's comics were suitable for the site. Samuel Klein, a veteran Wikipedian who serves on the board of trustees, intervened and restored her contributions. Mr. Klein says experiences like Ms. Paley's happen too often. Mr. Klein says that the Wikipedia community needs to rein in so-called deletionists -- editors who shoot first and ask questions later.

View Full Image

Nicolas Goldberg for The Wall Street Journal

"Wikipedians" from around the world gathered in August at the annual Wikimania conference in Buenos Aires

The Wikimedia Foundation says it is seeking to increase participation, but that growing the overall number of participants isn't its main focus.

"The early days were a gold rush," says Ms. Gardner, the foundation's executive director. "They attracted lots and lots of people, because a new person could write about anything." The encyclopedia isn't finished, she says, but the "easy work" of contributing is done.

To attract new recruits to help with the remaining work, Ms. Gardner has hired an outreach team, held seminars to train editors in overlooked categories, and launched task forces to seek ways to increase participation in markets such as India. The foundation also invested $890,000 in a new design for the site, slated to go live in the next few months, that aims to make editing easier for contributors who aren't computer-savvy.

 

Wikipedia on the Decline

3:53

WSJ's Julia Angwin interviews Andrew Lih, author of Wikipedia Revolution, about why volunteers are increasingly quitting Wikipedia.

She says increasing contributor diversity is her top goal. A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

Much of the task of making Wikipedia more welcoming to newcomers falls to Frank Schulenburg, the foundation's head of public outreach. An academic, he began contributing to articles about French philosophers on the German Wikipedia in 2005.

"The community has created its own language, and that is certainly a barrier to new participants," he says.

One of Mr. Schulenburg's first projects, called the "bookshelf," is an effort to gather the basic rules for contributing to Wikipedia in one place for newcomers. He hopes the new multimedia bookshelf will be the Wikipedia community's equivalent of a high-school civics textbook.

In Germany, to recruit more academics, Mr. Schulenburg had devised an educational program called Wikipedia Academy. In July, he conducted the first such program in the U.S., for scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. His goal was to entice the scientists to contribute.

Wikipedia already attracts lots of academics, but science isn't its strength. By its own internal grading standards, the article on Louis Pasteur, one of the founders of microbiology, for example, is lower in quality than its article on James T. Kirk, the fictional "Star Trek" captain.

For the July event, Mr. Schulenburg got about 100 scientists and NIH staffers to spend the day listening to arguments about why they should bother contributing to Wikipedia, despite the fact that it doesn't pay, won't help them get a grant or even win them applause from their peers.

His audience was skeptical about the lack of credentials among Wikipedia editors. "One of my concerns is not knowing who the editor is," said Lakshmi Grama, a communications official from the National Cancer Institute.

Several participants started contributing to Wikipedia right after the event. The NIH says it is considering whether to adopt formal policies to encourage its staff to contribute while at work.

Each year, Wikipedians from around the world gather at a conference they call Wikimania. At this year's meeting in Buenos Aires in August, participants at one session debated the implications of the demographic shifts.

"The number one headline I have been seeing for five years is that Wikipedia is dying," said Mathias Schindler, a board member of Wikimedia Germany. He argued that Wikipedia needed to focus less on the total number of articles and more on "smarter metrics" such as article quality.

He said he disagreed with dire views about the project's future. "I don't expect to see Wikipedia follow the rule of any curve or any projection."

Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@... and Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@...

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) just keeps invading new territories, and its latest
target is your computer's operating system. It's officially released the
open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system that will turn up
in third-party vendors' netbooks. Those devices should start selling next
year.

With Chrome, Google takes a very different approach than major OSes like
Windows, Mac OS, or even most Linux distributions. It's sort of like what
would happen if an Ubuntu mated with a Firefox. It's basically a browser
that does not run on an operating system -- it is an operating system. All
its apps are Web apps, and all the data you save using it is stored in the
cloud, in a state of statelessness, as Google puts it. Very little data is
actually saved on the computer's hard drive.

The advantage, as Google describes it, is that boot-up times are extremely
quick. Security is also easier to handle. If you aren't hosting any data
yourself, you also aren't hosting any malware. Finally, if someone steals
your Chrome netbook, and your password is nice and safe, then you'll be
able to reclaim all your data and settings simply by signing on to another
Chrome netbook -- which you'll have to buy, of course, but some data's
worth more than a few hundred bucks.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Googles-Strange-and-Shiny-New-OS-68707.html?w\
lc=1258823023

Ubuntu Studio. A multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic
enthusiast as well as professional.

We provide a suite of the best open-source applications available for
multimedia creation. Completely free to use, modify and redistribute. Your
only limitation is your imagination.

http://ubuntustudio.org/

Video editing with open source tools

http://www.digitalartistshandbook.org/node/35

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Geert Lovink <geert@...>
Date: 2009/11/21
Subject: who? (please fwd.)
To: "Frederick Noronha (FN)" <fred@...>


> From: "Duyn-Derwort, Karin van" <K.H.J.vanDuyn-Derwort@...>
> Date: 16 November 2009 13:47:31 CET
> Subject: Please forward to your members
> Dear colleagues,
> Do you happen to know any students that come from India that want to apply for
a PhD position on implementing tube wells in India within our section Tecnology
Dynamics & Sustainable Development?
>
> We have a vacancy that is open until the end of November and only people from
India can apply. This is a summary of the content of the PhD project: This
research is concerned with the redesign and use of the deep tube well (DTW) and
the targeted tube well (TTW). The deep tube well reaches deep aquifers with
arsenic free water. The targeted tube well "targets" specific aquifers that are
presumably free of arsenic and situated preferably between two impervious clay
layers. This cross-disciplinary research focuses on the question how these
solutions can be implemented in a socially and culturally sustainable way. Left
to their own dynamics, because these solutions are more expensive, the better
off in society will profit more from them. Can solutions be found in a
participatory way? These questions have to be answered within the framework of
ethics and technology dynamics, considering equal distribution and gender
(ethics), and the co-related development of technology and cultural values
(technology dynamics).
>
> For more information please contact Otto Kroesen (j.o.kroesen@...).
>
> Karin van Duijn-Derwort
> Secretary Technology Dynamics & Sustainable Development
> TUDelft/TBM
> Jaffalaan 5
> 2628 BX Delft
> Mon & Tue: 08:30-14:45
> Wed: 08:30-12:00
> Thu: 08:30-14:45
> T:+31 15 2783791
> F: +31 15 2783177



--
Frederick Noronha :: +91-832-2409490
Writing, editing, alt.publishing, photography, journalism
ANOTHER GOA: http://tiny.cc/anothergoa

On the 40th anniversary of what is widely regarded as the origin of the
internet, Professor Peter Willetts asks: 'Who really created the
internet?'


Peter Willetts will argue the Internet was established by the pioneering
work of  peace, human rights and environmental non- governmental
organisations (NGOs) in the 1980s.

November 2009 is being widely celebrated as the 40th anniversary of the
birth of the Internet, when three computers at different American
universities were linked together. However, this Pentagon-funded project,
ARPANET, only made minor contributions to the technology of the Internet.
The related story that the Internet was planned as an American military
command and control system that could survive a nuclear attack is no more
than a colourful myth.

The defining aspect of the Internet is the provision of public and open
access for global communications. Pioneering computer experts working for
NGOs drove the innovation and created an open network. This was achieved
before the first web page was written.

Until NGOs intervened, there was no more than a disconnected set of
separate government and commercial networks. NGOs made the global
connections and gave us the revolution in public communications.

     Professor Peter Willetts is a Professor of Global Politics at the
Department of International Politics, School of Social Sciences, City
University London.

     Peter Willetts� main research interests are in the area of
international organisations. He is a leading authority on the role of
NGOs in international diplomacy and has published two books on this
subject: Pressure Groups in the Global System and The Conscience of
the World: The Influence of Non-governmental Organisations in the UN
System. This lecture arises from research for a new textbook, NGOs in
Global Politics: The Construction of Global Governance.

http://www.city.ac.uk/whatson/2009/10_oct/291009_Peter_Willetts.html

Dear Telecentre Friends,

mMoney is a great opportunity to telecentres!

For long money movement in rural areas has been close to static. While
in the urban areas money is owned by many people and it can change
hands rapidly, in the rural areas very few people have money and it
mainly remains in the hands of those few who mainly purchase outside
the community e.g in urban markets... The problem is worsened by the
relatively waterproof geographical economies that can not easily allow
money flow from one economy to the other especially downwards e.g,
rural and urban (micro) and developed and developing countries (macro
economies) - this makes goods and service trade across economies very
hard. And indeed accounts as the main challenge of sustaining
telecentres as the purchasing power of the rural flocks merely shrinks
instead of swelling.

mWallet and its associated services address just this gap thus
unlocking new opportunities. But this may not just happen, the
telecentre movement will have to organize, incubate and nurture trade
relations with rural-urban and developing-developed countries that
improve quality output, goods and service mobility as supported by
mMoney systems.

There are already things that we can learn from especially Business
Process Outsourcing - BPO, online transcations, online education etc.
But the gaps that will remain the concern of the telecentre movement
will be in commodity trade where urban rural transportation will need
to be well thought out so that middlemen exploitation is completely
eliminated or minimised. Secondly, it is emergingly true that the
future is more uncertain about the applications of technology to
support the poor than the absence of the technology itself.

That said, telecentres of today and onwards, will emerge as Business
process linkage and support organs replacing or complementing the
roles of cooperatives and microbanks especially in the eyes of the
poor - they will become the gateways to rural development and improved
livelihoods.

And this forms the strategic focus of UgaBYTES for the year 2010/12.
Join the focus by making it your priority too or simply by becoming
partner in mind, in development... to those who have made it their
priority of work.


Help complete the cycle with positive feedback to whatever is good.



Best regards,
---
Sulah




On 11/16/09, Mwathi Francis <mfrancis@...> wrote:
> With mobile penetration reaching 100 per cent in many developed markets, the
> mobile phone will soon be in virtually everyone's pocket. Payments and
> banking are currently major areas of growth in the mobile world and these
> are set to become even more specialized than they are at the moment.
> According to a new report from Juniper Research the international mobile
> money transfer market will be worth in excess of US$65 billion by 2014,
> based on gross transaction values - driven principally from migrant workers
> based in developed countries.
>
> The huge potential for mobile money transfer can be seen from the sheer
> volume of cross-border remittances typically sent through existing channels
> such as banks and money transfer agencies. Measured flows have grown
> exponentially over the last decade, with an estimated US$248billion sent
> primarily from industrialised countries to the world's emerging markets in
> 2007. Although remittance flows are currently experiencing short-term
> decline, existing services and pilot projects have shown operators a
> feasible route towards gaining a share of those large remittance flows
> expected by and new mobile remittance services are expected by 2011 at the
> latest. Operators and banks in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa are
> in the process of deploying services primed to encourage and exploit
> potential growth.
>
> Major operators with international and inter-regional footprints such as
> Vodafone and Orascom Telecom have announced their intention to deploy mobile
> remittance, which they hope will act as a catalyst for the wider adoption of
> mWallet-enabled transaction services. Mobile remittance offers a speedy,
> cost effective and convenient channel for people to send money regularly to
> friends and family at home, who themselves may not have bank accounts.
>
> The mobile money transfer report also revealed a new emerging sector for
> microcredits, saving accounts and insurance payments. Known as
> "sophisticated financial services" these services are entirely focused on
> developing countries where users do not have access to traditional banking
> or financial services or simply use alternative means of payment
> traditionally such as physically transporting cash, or storing cash savings
> at home. The report found that is new market for financial services on the
> mobile, can add to the attractiveness of mobile money services, and help to
> reduce mobile operator churn.
>
> --
> Enter our Photo contest for your chance to win recognition and prizes from
> telecentre.org
> For more info, please check www.telecentre.org
>
>
> Francis Mwathi
> Support Community Facilitator
> UgaBYTES Initiatives (www.ugabytes.org)
> Telecentr.org (www.telecentrecommunity.ning.com)
> Tel: +256 414 370163
> Mob: +256 783 010269
> Skype: francis.mwathi
> E-Mail: mfrancis@...
> _______________________________________________
> ugabytes mailing list
> ugabytes@...
> http://lists.ugabytes.org/mailman/listinfo/ugabytes_lists.ugabytes.org
>


--
Executive Director
UgaBYTES Initiative
Tel: +256414370163
Mob: +256712314969
Skype: sulah.ndaula
Yahoo: ndaulasula
Email: ndaulasula@
(ugabytes.org,yahoo.co.uk or gmail)

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Shahzad Ahmad <shahzad@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> An excellent piece by genderIT.org team covers quite a few interesting points
reflecting on the first day of IGF 09.
>
> http://www.genderit.org/en/index.shtml?apc=f--e--1&x=96347
>

Thanks  Shahzad fr the link

Anivar

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Galyna Akmayeva <g.akmayeva@...>
Date: Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:54 PM
Subject: [osi-edu-discuss] CICE-2010: Call for Papers
To: osi-edu-discuss@...


Kindly email this call for papers to your colleagues,
faculty members and postgraduate students.

Apologies for cross-postings.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2010),
April 26-28, 2010, Toronto, Canada (www.ciceducation.org)


The CICE is an international refereed conference dedicated
to the advancement of the theory and practices in education.
The CICE promotes collaborative excellence between academicians
and professionals from Education.

The aim of CICE is to provide an opportunity for academicians
and professionals from various educational fields with
cross-disciplinary interests to bridge the knowledge gap, promote
research esteem and the evolution of pedagogy. The CICE 2010 invites
research papers that encompass conceptual analysis, design
implementation and performance evaluation. All the accepted papers
will appear in the proceedings and modified version of selected
papers willbe published in special issues peer reviewed journals.


The topics in CICE-2009 include but are not confined to the
following areas:

*Academic Advising and Counselling
*Art Education
*Adult Education
*APD/Listening and Acoustics in Education Environment
*Business Education
*Counsellor Education
*Curriculum, Research and Development
*Competitive Skills
*Continuing Education
*Distance Education
*Early Childhood Education
*Educational Administration
*Educational Foundations
*Educational Psychology
*Educational Technology
*Education Policy and Leadership
*Elementary Education
*E-Learning
*E-Manufacturing
*ESL/TESL
*E-Society
*Geographical Education
*Geographic information systems
*Health Education
*Higher Education
*History
*Home Education
*Human Computer Interaction
*Human Resource Development
*Indigenous Education
*ICT Education
*Internet technologies
*Imaginative Education
*Kinesiology & Leisure Science
*K12
*Language Education
*Mathematics Education
*Mobile Applications
*Multi-Virtual Environment
*Music Education
*Pedagogy
*Physical Education (PE)
*Reading Education
*Writing Education
*Religion and Education Studies
*Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
*Rural Education
*Science Education
*Secondary Education
*Second life Educators
*Social Studies Education
*Special Education
*Student Affairs
*Teacher Education
*Cross-disciplinary areas of Education
*Ubiquitous Computing
*Virtual Reality
*Wireless applications
*Other Areas of Education



For further information please visit CICE-2010
at www.ciceducation.org

_______________________________________________
osi-edu-discuss mailing list
osi-edu-discuss@...
http://members.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/osi-edu-discuss




--
┌─────────────────────────�\
�
│    Narendra Sisodiya ( नरेन्द्र सिसोदिया )
│    Society for Knowledge Commons
│    Web : http://narendra.techfandu.org
└─────────────────────────�\
�

Gram Vaani is looking for software engineers and technical support staff. Please
take a look at the detailed job descriptions:

http://gramvaani.org/get-involved/job-openings/

regards
Aaditeshwar

Greetings from the IGF,

Our ONI reception today at the IGF was rattled by IGF security, who objected
to a poster advertising "Access Controlled", the book to be introduced at
this event.
The poster was thrown on the floor and we were told to remove it because of
the reference to China and Tibet.  We refused, and security guards came and
removed it. The incident was witnessed by many.

The poster promoting ONI new forthcoming book "Access Controlled" was
removed by the IGF's organizers because a sentence in the poster violated
UN's policy. The sentence in question reads, "The first generation of
Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet
gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall of China" is one of the first
national Internet filtering systems."

"If we cannot discuss topics about Internet censorship and surveillance
policy at a forum about Internet governance then what is the point of
something like the IGF," said Ron Deibert Director of the Citizen Lab, Munk
Centre for International Studies,and one of ONI's principal investigators.

According to Ron Deibert of The Citizen Lab and Open Net Initiatives (ONI)
Principal, one of the organizers of the reception event, he will file a
complaint against the`censorship' of their event and send it to the United
Nations Human Rights Commission.

"We condemn this undemocratic act of censoring our event just because
someone is trying to impress or be in the good graces of the Chinese
government. It is ironic that while people are allowed to gather here to
discuss freedom of expression online, censorship and surveillance practices
on the Internet, we are being restricted in expressing our views," said Al
Alegre of the Foundation for Media Alternatives, a member of the ONI
Network.

We the members of ONI Network protest on this censorship at IGF, and ask the
question that What IGF is for, if we can not discuss Internet Governance
issues at this forum.

Best wishes and regards

Shahzad

Copyright Watch: http://www.copyright-watch.org/

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release

For Immediate Release: Friday, November 13, 2009

International Activists Launch New Website to Gather and
Share Copyright Knowledge

Anyone Can Track National Copyright Laws Globally with

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),
Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net), and other
international copyright experts joined together today to
launch Copyright Watch -- a public website created to
centralize resources on national copyright laws at
www.copyright-watch.org.

"Copyright laws are changing across the world, and it's
hard to keep track of these changes, even for those whose
daily work is affected by them," said Teresa Hackett,
Program Manager at eIFL.net.  "A law that is passed in one
nation can quickly be taken up by others, bilateral trade
agreements, regional policy initiatives, or international
treaties.  With Copyright Watch, people can learn about the
similarities and differences in national copyright laws,
and they can use that information to more easily spot
patterns and emerging trends."

Copyright Watch is the first comprehensive and up-to-date
online repository of national copyright laws.  To find
links to national and regional copyright laws, users can
choose a continent or search using a country name.  The
site will be updated over time to include proposed
amendments to laws, as well as commentary and context from
national copyright experts.  Copyright Watch will help
document how legislators around the world are coping with
the challenges of new technology and new business models.

"Balanced and well-calibrated copyright laws are extremely
important in our global information society," said Gwen
Hinze, International Policy Director at EFF.  "Small shifts
in the balance between the rights of copyright owners and
the limitations and exceptions relied on by those who use
copyrighted content can destroy or enable business models,
criminalize or liberate free expression and everyday
behavior, and support the development of new technologies
that facilitate access to knowledge for all the world's
citizens.  We hope that Copyright Watch will encourage
comparative research and help to highlight more and less
flexible copyright regimes."

"Details of copyright law used to be important only for a
few people in creative industries," added Danny O'Brien,
International Outreach Coordinator at EFF.  "But now, with
the growth of the Internet and other digital tools, we are
all authors, publishers, and sharers of copyrighted works.
Copyright Watch was created so citizens of the world can
share and compare information about their countries' laws."

Funding to create Copyright Watch was generously provided
by the Open Society Institute.

Copyright Watch:
http://www.copyright-watch.org

For this release:
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/11/13

Contact:

Gwen Hinze
International Policy Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
gwen@...
+1 415 436-9333 x110 (office)

Danny O'Brien
International Outreach Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
danny@...
+1 415 436-9333 x121

About EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil
liberties organization working to protect rights in the
digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and
challenges industry and government to support free
expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported
organization and maintains one of the most linked-to
websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/

Copyright Watch

Copyright Watch collects and monitors copyright laws from all over the world.

http://www.copyright-watch.org/

The details of copyright law used to be important for only a few in the
creative industries. Now, with the growth of the Internet, we are all
authors, publishers, and sharers of copyrighted works.

Our dream was to build a user-friendly resource of national copyright laws
to help citizens of the world undertake comparative research. We wanted to
raise awareness of the importance of balanced copyright law in the
information society, and draw attention to points of commonality and of
difference in countries' laws and legal traditions. We also wanted to
create an information sharing resource, where copyright watchers could
post information about proposed amendments to their own copyright laws,
and understand the changes in others.

We hope that Copyright Watch will be a resource maintained and driven by
the Access to Knowledge community and that copyright monitors in each
country will help to keep this information up to date and relevant.

Finally, we hope that Copyright Watch will help document the importance of
copyright to all aspects of cultural life and human freedom. Balanced and
well-calibrated copyright laws are extremely important in our global
information society. The smallest shift in the legal balance between the
rights of copyright owners and users of copyrighted knowledge can destroy
or enable business models, criminalize or liberate everyday behaviour, and
transform or eradicate new technology. A law that is passed in one nation
can quickly be taken up by others, through bilateral trade agreements,
regional policy initiatives or international treaties. We all need to keep
watch.

Piwigo 2.0
http://piwigo.org/

Out of the vast universe of available photo gallery software packages,
Piwigo distinguishes itself with a snappy user interface and a set of
customizable features. Foremost among these features is a category "tree"
which lets users create photo categories that expand and flatten the tree
structure to view all the photos. Visitors can also set up user
permissions and also create rating tabs for each photo, or groups of
photos. This version is compatible with computers running Mac OS 10.3 or
newer or Windows 95 and newer.

Piwigo is a photo gallery software for the web that comes with powerful
features to publish and manage your collection of pictures.

Started in 2002, the project is now supported by an active community of
users and developers. It supports numerous galleries of all sizes all over
the world, from an individual ten-photos party to the images stock of an
agency. This scalability is supported by smart browsing capabilities based
on categories, tags and chronological search. Various extensions make
Piwigo even more scalable and customizable to suit your own needs and
desires.

Piwigo is both web and photo standard compliant. And, icing on the cake,
it is free and opensource.

Via The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2009.
http://scout.wisc.edu/

Dear List Participants,

This is a query to determine if anyone on the list is aware of similar
projects to the one described below. I would like to touch base with
them to determine lessons learnt, etc., and hopefully avoid
re-inventing the wheel.

While the project described is Botswana-centric, suggestions of
similar projects in other parts of Africa (including Botswana, of
course), are welcome. Many thanks in advance for your response.

Project description -

"The aim is to undertake an action research project, to share
knowledge of HIV/Aids in rural Botswana, with the support of local
organisations, and overseas aid. AIDS sufferers will be surveyed
widely to understand what information they need. The �action� will
involve the provision of free access to information about the means of
infection, and to create a free support service for those believing
they are subject to infection, or who have been infected. The
information will be spoken, verbal, in local languages"


Best,

Sriram

That's the learned opinion of an educator in this month's Educational Technology
Debate - an initiative of the World Bank & Unesco.  He feels we should abandon
evaluations of ICT in schools because they are warped & promoted via political
prejudices, not any kind of empirical data.


   ICT in Education Assessments are Biased and Inaccurate
   http://tinyurl.com/ict4e-assessment-failure


Do you agree? Or is he inaccurate in his condemnation of ICT assessments?

Wayan
http://twitter.com/wayan_vota

What is Spot.Us About?

Spot.Us is a nonprofit project of the Center for Media Change and funded
by various groups like the Knight Foundation.

We are an open source project, to pioneer �community funded reporting.�
Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do reporting on
important and perhaps overlooked topics. Contributions are tax deductible
and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your
donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available
through a Creative Commons license. It�s a marketplace where independent
reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and
collaborate.

You can learn more about us at our Press Page, the FAQ's page.
http://spot.us/

NY Times story on the pacific garbage patch. It's twice the size of texas!
http://bit.ly/KcJBB

Story: Dissecting the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
In the science section of the New York Times November 10th, 2009 you'll
find a story from Lindsey Hoshaw on the Pacific Garbage Patch. This story
was partly funded by the Spot.Us community and is credited as such.
http://spot.us/stories/252-dissecting-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch

- - - - -

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iSC_k8BSFHlGN6nbX0mpFbUaF1Tw


New York Times publishes 'crowd-funded' article
(AFP) � 1 day ago

WASHINGTON � The science section of The New York Times contained an
unusual article on Tuesday. The story about a huge floating garbage
patch in the Pacific Ocean was not written by a Times reporter but by
a freelance journalist whose expenses were paid by hundreds of donors
in an experiment in "crowd-funded" journalism.

The travel expenses for journalist Lindsey Hoshaw's trip were raised
through Spot.Us, which describes itself as a "nonprofit project to
pioneer 'community funded' reporting."

Spot.Us, according to its website, allows the public to "commission
investigations with tax deductible donations for important and perhaps
overlooked stories.

"It?s a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and
news organizations can come together and collaborate," it says.

The website lists 6,000 dollars in donations for the Pacific garbage
patch story from more than 100 people.

Among the listed donors are Web luminaries such as Craig Newmark, the
founder of classified site Craigslist, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales,
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and others.

Spot.Us is a project of the Center for Media Change, a San
Francisco-based non-profit.

- - - - -

Spot.Us has been covered and talked about by traditional news
organizations like the New York Times, NPR and PBS as well as new media
giants like TechCrunch and Wired. Below is a sampling which should give
you sense of just how much attention Spot.Us is making for our innovative
approach to funding journalism.

http://www.spot.us/pages/press/

Dear BytesForAll Readers,

I would like to bring your attention to Wikipedia's entry on
BytesForAll at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BytesForAll

The entry needs to be improved with citations otherwise it is
scheduled for removal. I would like to invite all of you to
participate in improving this article for the B4A community at large.

--
Regards.
--------------------------
Fouad Bajwa
Advisor & Researcher
ICT4D & Internet Governance
Member Multistakeholder Advisory Group (IGF)
Member Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus (IGC)
My Blog: Internet's Governance
http://internetsgovernance.blogspot.com/
Follow my Tweets:
http://twitter.com/fouadbajwa
MAG Interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATVDW1tDZzA

Dear readers,

As you probably know, Bytesforall has opened up an 'ICT for health'
network at Ning (http://ictforhealth.ning.com/) to examine whether
ICTs can play any transformational role in the development, delivery
or management of health care services for the poorer of the society.
We plan to undertake some other research work from this network.

Therefore, we're looking for volunteer editors who can help us
organize the work, update the library, events calendar, post content
on related projects or development, invite experts/enthusiasts on the
area and build the network with new discussion, content and
activities. If you're interested to be a volunteer editor, please do send us
an email at: partha@... and join the network.

We look forward to hearing from you. Best wishes,

Partha Sarker
Bytesforall Initiative

Dear Colleagues,

I wanted to share the link to my blog that specifically covers global
Internet governance: http://internetsgovernance.blogspot.com/

The motivation comes after repeated requests from friends and
colleagues to consolidate my comments related to IGF and now ICANN as
well as IG in general within a single space that is both accessible to
share comments.

Therefore, I will be collecting all my thoughts and comments from
participation within the IGF and ICANN meetings on a regular basis and
feel free to comment and share your own ideas thereof. Do follow my
comments from the IGF meeting in Sharam El-Sheikh and my endeavours on
IG at ICANN.

If you have any information or links that you may want to share
including links to your blogs, I would love to share them on my blog
and vice versa.

--
Regards.
--------------------------
Fouad Bajwa
Advisor & Researcher
ICT4D & Internet Governance
Member Multistakeholder Advisory Group (IGF)
Member Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus (IGC)
My Blog: Internet's Governance
http://internetsgovernance.blogspot.com/
Follow my Tweets:
http://twitter.com/fouadbajwa
MAG Interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATVDW1tDZzA

Distance Learning Resources & Online Education Articles

The article also talks about how earning a higher degree through Online Education helps in shaping up one's professional career and helps to excel at the ...

Online Education Facts - Online Education Articles

A Lot of Diversification in Online Zoology Degree