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Technicaltalk: WikiFM: How do you bring open knowledge to the world top laboratories?

Science, knowledge and freedom - a tale of passion and excitement

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WikiFM wants to change the way we create knowledge, how we study and how we approach top level education. How do you create a vibrant community which brings together the world best laboratories with the culture of freedom typical of an open project? How can you allow students to share and contribute their work while ensuring the thoroughness and quality required by a scientifcal textbook? This is the story of a few students, researchers and professors that are trying (with some success) to make the world a better place, while contributing to the diversity of the KDE community.

Some years ago, a group of students from the University of Milano-Bicocca found themselves full of scientifical material, created during the years of hard study, that had much didactical value, but with very limited possibility to be spread to future generations. They invested blood and tears into those manuscripts, and they didn’t want to be in the same positions of previous students, whose amazing work was available and circulating for just a couple of years after the creation.
Fortunately some of them had some experience with Free Software projects, and a solution was found: a wiki! Ideas and concepts were flowing, the project growed fast, and the wiki started to be useful to many other people outside the initial group, which brought everybody to realize what a powerful tool it could become, if used correctly. The ideas were so powerful that it awakened the attention of the HEP Software Foundation, a scientifical group which contains some of the best minds of the top world institutions, such as CERN, Princeton, Stanford and INFN. And exactly related to this, we have a very big announcement which we kept secret just for Akademy.

Understanding that KDE is not particularly aware of the WikiFM effort (also because of the very different nature of the project), we would like to present the project to the wider community, with our vision for the future and our short term goals, including the most pressing of them all - internationalization. We see this moment as a big opportuinty for creating more links between the two communities, to strengthen the KDE roots, get the discussion flowing, and finally give a big push forward to open didactics.

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Day: 2015-07-25
Start time: 11:35
Duration: 00:30
Track: Main Talk (30min)

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