Almost two years ago, but still interesting to hear Jimbo Wales talk about vision and Wikipedia for a public of the Long Now Foundation. (He mentions me and some work I did in Mali.) Thanks to Alex for the tip.
Monthly Archive for January, 2008
In the beginning of November Robin asked me if I’d somehow be interested in renting a place in Amsterdam. I had been thinking of moving to Amsterdam after Trento, but I considered his question a bit preposterous. Fortunately he rented the place himself and now we’re room mates! During my years abroad I sometimes considered Amsterdam the only place left to live in the Netherlands. Going around here on foot and by bike I learn to appreciate my own country again. The bikes are amazing, transport is so efficient (if you don’t go by car). There is so much freedom and still, it’s not a mess.
Friday I went to a hospitality exchange meeting, which I found kinda weird. People were sitting in their own corner and I hadn’t seen anybody hug. So I started moving around, to talk to more people, ask them silly questions (”Do you like monkeys?”) and even hug them. It was slightly better that way.
Working for Hyves is exciting. The number of website hits is growing weekly and only Google is rating higher in the Netherlands. The complexity of the material is challenging and I’m part of a small team of very bright people. The office culture is more open, dynamic and agile than at IRST in Trento and my number of friends at hyves.nl doubled in no time.
Today I received that my abstract that I submitted to the IDLELO3 conference that will be held in Dakar from the 18th till the 20th of March was accepted. Here it is:
Wikipedia in West African languages
Wikipedia is a project for the creation of free encyclopedias in many
languages. The project has a huge potential for the education and
development of West Africa, where there are hardly any books or
educational material available in native languages.The Wikipedias in Bambara, Peul and Wolof were started in the
beginning of 2005.The interface of the Bambara and Peul Wikipedias were partly
translated and some articles had been written as part of a side
project of a Geekcorps Mali volunteer, in which people were given one
dollar for every article placed on-line (with total expenses less than
100$). After 2005 there was only sparse activity, and in December 2007
there are respectively 142 and 28 articles.Not much happened to the version in Wolof until 2006, when many tiny
articles with no real content were added to the Wolof Wikipedia. Then
in April 2007 a Senegalese student living in Italy starting adding a
lot of text in Wolof, and in November the Wikipedia reached 500
articles.We think combining an efficient distribution (e.g. through
Moulinwiki.org) and content in native languages (besides Arabic,
French, English or Portuguese) will offer great educational
opportunities to Africans. Our hope is that NGOs, universities,
Africans (both in and outside Africa) will be inspired to join in
these efforts.
I hope that I can meet up with Ibou, whom I´ve met before in Italy and with Renaud a former Geek who created Moulinwiki and did a lot more awesome work in Mali. Recently he set up an official French non-profit organization: Kunnafoni.
Sometimes I get in touch with friends I haven’t seen in a long time, but most of the time Facebook is just terribly annoying. There are the vampires and growing gifts, and many more time wasting “applications”. I also noticed that more than 50% of the requests come from less than 10% of my “friends”.
Today I went through the usual “confirm requests” and decided to check out at least the Super Wall (after tons of requests). I clicked through the sign-up process without looking, without selecting anything and no friends at all. Out of gratitude Super Wall decided to send a postcard with “how to get a boyfriend: wear slutty clothes, laugh at his jokes, put out on the first date” in my name, to all my Facebook contacts. Great. … Not.
A partly solution for these annoyances is an optional blocking of applications and requests from certain friends.
And I’m not sure how to fix the sheer abuse by the Super Wall application. Is there some kind of member feedback about applications to Facebook?
Hyves is a Dutch social network based in Amsterdam. I’ve been a member for a while now and I mainly used it to find people I know from my primary and secondary school. On the 29th of November I noticed that they were looking for people. I sent them a very short message with a link to my CV. Koen, one of the three founders, responded within 20 minutes. Exactly one week later I was in a plane heading to Amsterdam to attend the party to celebrate the 5.000.000th member. Most of these members live in the Netherlands; the majority of young people in the Netherlands have a Hyves account and many are actively using it. Officially I will start working for Hyves on the 1st of February.
There is a Hyves API (currently beta, mostly in Dutch) and will be implementing OpenSocial and some more very exciting technology. I will have to limit the time I spend on other projects but the contract I signed is quite liberal (e.g. compared to this one for CouchSurfing volunteers). On top of that, Hyves actively participates in the development of Gentoo Linux.
This weekend there will be a party in Trento. I’m moving next week, I will attend the first BeWelcome (un)conference in Antwerpen on the 19th and 20th, and I already found some places to live in Amsterdam.
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