There are some perennial projects that take more than a single barnraising to understand and plan for. One is the issue of supporting different languages equally — the world’s largest and smallest languages are both underrepresented among the projects.  While I would like to see Wikimedia become a model for the rest of the online world in this area, how a global community can provide support, bugfixes, and advice to different/new language groups is an issue for many multilingual projects.  So I offer these questions to all readers – feel free to answer them for the projects you are most familiar with.

• What technical and other support do various language projects need to become awesome?
• What variations are needed for projects whose main goal is language and cultural preservation?
• What sharing of advice or practices would make starting new projects easier?
• How can established projects help new projects with outreach, communication, and planning?

Let me offer one example of how this has been difficult to grasp within Wikimedia: discussions on the early international list were generally in English.  This led to a certain founder effect among participants, and in how the projects are today framed to the world, from elaborations of the vision to interface design.  And this has forked discussions of what language projects need – those in the language of the project, which can happen easily and fluidly among its participants and contributors, and those meta-discussions in one or two shared languages with the potential of setting Wikimedia-wide policy or affecting all projects.

As another example: non-Latin character sets, and cultural differences about editing and participation across different parts of the world, have always been part of discussions about how Wikipedia and its sister projects should advance.  Nevertheless, the early language communities drawn to the project were largely European, and issues that only affect non-Latin readers can still take a while to fix (for instance, replacements for Roman-alphabet captchas, or fixes to javascript and css layouts in corner cases).

What are your examples? What am I leaving out?  How can the global community and the Foundation better support small and underrepresented languages?  Feel free to leave links to current or historical discussions about problems and opportunities.

Thank you also to Philippe and the elections team, and to all candidates who took time to run.  I was particularly glad to see Góngora running, as a new face in meta-affairs, and I hope to see more participation in meta discussion by active es:wp contributors.

I will help the Board be more open.  I have revived the Wikimedia meetings page for suggested agenda items – please leave your ideas and comments there, in any language.  (I know this is a tough thing to request in a monolingual blog.  Suggestions for making this blog more accessible are welcome.)  I will post my own thoughts about agenda items there in advance of future Board meetings.  One of my first efforts will be getting all foundation resolutions and policies translated into Wikimedia’s core languages.

The next one is coming up in a few weeks, during Wikimania – I don’t officially become a Board member until we meet.  I am looking forward to Wikimania, and hope to see some of you there!

I have also updated the old Wikimedia Reports page, as one way to better coordinate organize information – please help add new reports to it, and translate it into other languages.

Meanwhile, my friend Kat Walsh has not yet stood for re-election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, though I hope she will!

Update: she did, and she was reelected for another term!  Congratulations

She is among the last of a certain breed of board members who have been strong advocates for community involvement in key decisions, and we could use more.  The current Wikimedia Foundation is strongly in support of openness even without nagging from the Board – for instance in framing the upcoming year-long strategic planning as a process to facilitate and crystalize plans from the many communities – but without active community trustees we might no longer be so lucky a few years from now.

My official statement, and throwback to an earlier era, after the jump.

Here is what I said in my brief statement, the blurb every candidate offers which is translated into dozens of languages before the election begins

Wikimedia should be a model for open, scalable organizations.

As a Board member, I would be a strong community voice, communicating regularly about the Board’s work, holding open meetings and soliciting public input. I support developing expertise within the community.

I would also

• fight for better support for translation and multilingual communication across Wikimedia, particularly for planning discussions
• represent the technical and practical needs of smaller projects
• encourage careful use of funds and goodwill, planning for long-term availability of the projects (with an endowment and core services)
• encourage delegating outreach & community development to chapters

About me: I am an editor, translator, steward, and public advocate for Wikipedia. I started the Meta translators network and the Wikimedia Quarto newsletter (in 5 languages) in 2004, and was secretary of the Special Projects Committee. I founded the Boston meetup group and helped run the first two Wikimanias, hosting Wikimania2006 in Boston.

Outside Wikimedia, for 3 years I have been director of content at One Laptop per Child, working on local partnerships for free content and offline distribution.

I greatly enjoyed Aaron Swartz’s regular blogging in 2006 about important ideas, and mean to follow his example for the coming weeks.

UPDATE:  Our street was lucky.  Our house is good as ever, having no enormous trees nearby.  My mother reports the only noise it made was a loud humming from the gutters at a certain windspeed (I could hear it over the phone!).

UPDATE 2: A house across the street had its roof aerated by falling trees from both adjacent properties, and the ancient oak in the open lot next to us (vacated and cleared after the last big flood) was ripped down.  Flooding wasn’t bad; only 2 ft of water in the street.  The local bayou is far from the main channel, and was a good 3 feet from flowing over when high tide passed at 4pm.  10 blocks away things were worse…  Now everyone just has to make do without power for the next fortnight.

UPDATE 3: Only 1m are still without power; we expect to do without for another week.

And this is why we went into space 40 years ago: an image of Ike from the International Space Station… with a little ’station finger’ over the lens.  Great buildings such as the Pyramids and the Wall are, despite what they say, hard to see from space.  But massive atmospherics?  You can see those from Saturn.

More below the fold.

From the coast:

How Texans prepare for the London olympics.

I can’t seem to stop editing new wikis.  Here’s one that’s even gotten me to journal…

Wikis abound …

Both first and last on my list. First, because you have been on it for a decade; were its founding member. I have long owed you the impossible, or at least a calligraphed letter to that effect. Last, for celebrating less warmly than deserved your liberation from the far side of the pond.

It held plumb, level, solid, square and true for that one great moment… The key to Dugan’s lucidity is that it is really hard to nail even one hand to a crosspiece yourself, whether or not you are a carpenter. Those asking a great deal have often sacrificed a great deal first. Thankfully, by that point it rarely feels like sacrifice.