Dear all, since Wednesday, August 28th until today I have been to Vienna and like to report what I did and what some things we will be doing also in the future.
The original reason for my trip to Vienna was a workshop about the planned Open Data Portal Austria. The "Cooperation Open Government Data Austria", to which the Federal Chancellor's Office, the Municipality of Vienna and almost all municipalities in Austria belong to, operates such a portal which hosts only data of the public administration and wishes that there would be a "private" portal businesses, citizens etc. as an supplement. This doesn't belong to te mission of the Cooperation OGD Austria, so they are looking for partners who would run such a portal. This fits into our mission of collecting and providing free knowledge. After Claudia (ED of WMAT) and me have been invited by the Federal Chancellor's Office to the conference "Efficient State" in May and meet further potential project partners, we had a first meeting at the Federal Chancellor's Office in July with their representatives to kick-off the project. * https://mitglieder.wikimedia.at/Projekte/Open_Data_Portal/2013-07-02-ODP-Protokoll To clarify some questions this workshop has been scheduled as a working meeting. After it had been quite hard for me to follow the first meeting in July, being dialed-in via Skype, it was very helpful to speak in person with the project partners. Several basic questions could be settled but we still depend on information from the Federal Data Center and Peter Parycek before we can plan activities and create a project schedule. It is very great that Claudia has in collaboration with Martin Kaltenböck of the OKFN handed in an application for netidee.at to get external funding. We don't know yet if it will be successful. The projects name has now officially been choosen "Open Data Portal Austria", relevant domains have been secured or will be requested via international OKFN contacts. If the portal in Austria works and is successful we would like to expand it to all german-speaking countries. The partnership with OKFN is very helpful as they also develop CKAN, the software behind most Open Data portals. In September the annual conference of OKFN takes place in Geneva, where several Wikimedia representatives will participate. * https://mitglieder.wikimedia.at/Projekte/Open_Data_Portal/2013-08-30-ODP-Protokoll The workshop was a good opportunity to further develop the infrastructure in Vienna. At my last visit in March I could only the the most neccessary things due to my illness, so I took now the time between the other appointments to finalise the installation of the Windows server, set up an Active Directory domain and integrate the three workstations. Now all user data from the notebooks is being synchronised to the server, users can move between computers and still work with their data and settings on any of them. This adds more comfort when using the available hardware and more security in case of hardware failures. The migration was not completely flawless, I had to invest a lot of time to get used to Windows Server 2012 which is quite different from the 2008 version and as the notebooks had prior been used standalone and all profiles needed to be integrated into the new profiles there were some naming conflicts and security-ID mismatches to fix. I plan to reinstall the clients the next time I will be in Vienna to eliminate further sources of problems on the notebooks. As WMAT uses standardized hardware back at the initial installation I had created a template image of the system, so the reinstallation will be quick and easy. WMCH has an almost identical infrastructure than WMAT, so the new Windows Server setup can be copied to get ours done as well. Just with the notebooks / workstations we haven't had a chance to standardize anything yet, as everyone works with private computers. Anh will be the first exception. As the meeting of the editorial group Food and Beverages on german Wikipedia was moved to this weekend and as the WikiTV equipment had been used in Germany last week and was on the way to being sent back to me, I told WMDE to send it to Vienna instead. So I could attend the meeting this Saturday and Sunday in the school kitchen to watch the cooking, help with the groceries and dishes and make a few videos: How to prepare meat properly, how to make a butterfly cut, how to make a proper Wiener Schnitzel etc. I also took some photos which are prepared to be uploaded to Commons as soon as I have proper internet: * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Redaktionstreffen_Essen_und_Trinken_Wien_2013 Also I used my time to make new contacts regarding WikiTV in Vienna. A participant of WikiCon 2012 who enganges in sustainability and society development projects put me into contact with TV21.at and an activist in the 21st district. Their plan is to document the monuments in their district by video clips, supplementary to Wiki Loves Monuments. The videos could make use of additional information, such as explanations or old photographic material. In parallel we will try to run an educational program - one year, four weekends, one workshop per quarter - where we want to continue what has already started with a Video Editing Workshop a few weeks ago in Berlin. The difference is that these workshops will be advertised internationally and will be held in english. The goal is by the fourth workshop to have transfered good knowledge about videos (camera setting, editing, video patterns) and then start an international video project within the Wikimedia movement to get the small video projects out of their niches in some language versions in some Wikimedia project, as it is today. Until WLM 2014 we would then also be able to evaluate how the pilot project in the 21st district has developed. TV21.at will be leading the video productions, if that works videos could become part of WLM. Of course Claudia and me also took the opportunity to maintain our already existing contacts of WikiTV. Yesterday evening we sat with Julius Kratky of ORF and discussed the new developments with the 21st district and talked about next steps concerning our cooperation with ORF. Beforehand we need to clarify the rights to use Wikimedia logos as part of the TV shows but we are confident that we will get them from the WMF. So far the activities of the last days. For the first time I travelled by train which has proved to be comfortable and cheap if you choose the right connection. As I have a General Abonnement and a Rail Plus card the whole trip only cost 138 CHF. As the RailJet offers free internet in Austria I could spend the 9,5 hours productively. Under these circumstances it is reasonable to plan another visit to Vienna in October which could, with good planning in advance, as busy as this one. Suggestions for dates are welcome. Thanks a lot to Claudia and Thomas of WMAT for their support of all the mentioned projects! Regards, Manuel -- Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Lausanne, +41 (21) 34066-22 - www.wikimedia.ch _______________________________________________ http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website Wikimediach-l mailing list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l
