Matthew Bishop, who is with the Economist in NY, took issue and responded on his blog Philantrocapitalism..

Both posts are worth reading. I very much like the idea of philanthrophy as risk investment in areas that are important and maybe don’t attract typical risk capital. The Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship, which helped start P2PU, is an excellent example for risk philanthropy. But ultimately I fall on the side of Peter Buffett. And I feel the criticism focuses too much on the window dressing, and not enough on the core of his arguments.

For example, the point he makes about “one hand takes, the other gives back (to feel better)”. Mr Bishop suggests that is not the case and lists Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to make his point. But even looking at Microsoft, there is a direct link between keeping computer software artificially high to extract rents from African governments, and limiting how many potential innovators in Africa were able to use computers in the 90s. A more philantrocapitalist approach might have been to co-design the software to be more suitable to users in developing countries, implement more flexible pricing schemes, and build capacity in Africa for software development. All of those initiatives would have slowed the growth of MSFT and reduced its profitability, but they would have given African innovators a leg up – towards solving their own problems today.

I can think of many other examples where this is the case. The financial cost of international remittances is a transfer of wealth from the poorest (who are sending money home to their families) to some of the richest (the owners of the banks). Rather than praising some of them to then give back money, we should push them to do things that reduced their income now – and create opportunity for poor people to solve their own problems. Another example are telecommunications companies who by extracting rents from fast growing African markets, are effectively limiting access to the Internet. Oil companies who use any and all means to get access to natural resources in West Africa. All of this is much more complicated than I make it out in 2 paragraphs. Clearly it is not simply the work of some greedy foreigners.

However, it is an important enough point to pay attention to for those interested in understanding and improving philanthropy.

Call for course organizers is below:

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a great place to learn the craft of open and standards-based web development.

This coming September we’ll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we’d love to have you involved.

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community – so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.

Over the next 18 months we’ll be developing a new way of assessing and recognizing skills, hacker attitudes and knowledge that rewards project portfolios and realistic developer challenges, rather than hours spent cramming for a meaningless exam.

We’d love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we’re inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We’ve made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

Propose a Course -> Fill out this short form.

If you’re unable to commit to organising a course this September, there are other great ways to become a part of the community whether as a curriculum adviser, web development guru and of course, as a student.

If you are interested in taking a course -> add your name.

Join the P2PU Webcraft community -> subscribe to our mailing list.

Last week a meeting on “Learning, Freedom & the Web” hosted by the Carnegie Foundation brought together a mix of learning experts and web industry geeks to keep the web open for learning. One of the topics that bubbled up naturally was the rising popularity of gated digital communities such as Facebook and closed content delivery mechanisms like the iPad-iTunes-Appstore combination, and their implications for the future of open learning ecosystems.

Mike Hanson from Mozilla Labs sketched out what education could look like if redesigned by Steve Jobs. A vertically integrated content hosting and delivery solution built on Apple Server software and it’s iPhone, iPod and iPad line of consumer devices (of which over 100,000,000 have been sold). Textbooks are stored in the iTextbook store – and organized in appropriate collections for students who automatically download all the content they need to the range of IProducts. If you are an educator or administrator this new world of iEducation sounds pretty slick and compelling. And even if you are an open web activist like  Mike Hanson it is hard to resist – in fact, it was his own brand new iPad on the table that got us started on this  trajectory.

And because curation and integration are so compelling when designed well, we need to carefully think through the implications now. If a personal computing experience built on open standards is the crib, then learning and freedom might be about to go out the window.

As we know already there won’t be any porn in Steve Jobs iEducation ecosystem, but there also won’t be much messiness and tinkering and the kind of practices that characterize constructivist learning processes. There is value in a curated and integrated entertainment experience – I myself have marveled at the ease of purchasing and downloading a digital album directly onto my phone and then syncing it into a music library stored on my computer. However, I am a music consumer – and in meaningful learning systems there are designers, builders, players and doers – but no consumers.

Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation made the connection back to the education system. Half thinking-out-loud, half predicting the trouble to come she suggested that the vertically integrated learning ecology that devices like the iPad enable are perfectly in line with the way the current education system is structured – and will therefore be happily embraced by it.

That’s why we need to understand the long-term implications, push the closed model to at least offer open interfaces and transparency, and put in place open alternatives that offer value in ways that closed approaches can’t.

What could have turned into a pretty gloomy afternoon, was saved by the same innovation process that the open web is so good at: identify the pieces that are in place, see how they can be connected, and start designing and building. We came up with 8 concrete project ideas that are made possible by combining an open source attitude with a deep passion and concern for equitable learning.

I won’t list them all here, but there are a few that are most relevant to P2PU and which we volunteered to play a part in.

• The P2PU School of Webcraft – our partnership with Mozilla to radically innovate how web developers get trained and find jobs – fits within a broader bucket for linking community assessment, badges (think boy scouts), and employment opportunities. It raises questions about ownership and control of the individual’s education data – the obvious answer coming from the open web community is that it should be the individual who is in charge of her learning data, but the reality today is that lots of different pieces are stuck in different institutions. Thinking beyond web developers, we’d like to find a few other areas where this would work.
• Does open increase equity? - Mimi Ito reminded us that for open learning to become more than just another opportunity entrenching inequality in education, it needs to increase equity and access. She suggested we needed empirical research to identify areas within the closed certification system that are truly broken and investigate how new open approaches like the one described above could help fix them. I believe web development is one such area, where employers find that existing university degrees or private training certification have little to say about an applicant’s abilities as a web developer – the truly relevant things are not assessed – but Mimi is right that we need more robust research to go from anecdotal evidence to validation of these claims.

Other projects included formal university courses where students engage with Wikipedia content, a look at opportunities around Google Apps (which raises interesting questions about which aspects of an open ecosystem need to be open), and concrete ideas for working with particular programs and partners, for example Road Trip Nation.

The small event at Carnegie was just the beginning of new collaborations between the open web world and learning. Those projects that can demonstrate they are moving forward will meet again to plan the next stage of implementation in September, and hopefully have first prototypes to share with the world in November – where the Mozilla Drumbeat festival in Barcelona offers an opportunity to showcase our work, and reach out to more collaborators.

And the winners are …

Really, all ten projects that were at the Austin Design Camp, are Design Challenge winners, but three get a special mention. The three stood out for different reasons and we wanted to highlight this diversity in excellence. Expression Widgets got the prize for “best open web hack”. ClozeFox was selected as “best use case” and Laurian Gridinoc from the Mupple project deserves the prize for “sharing knowledge with others”.

Expression Widgets has awesome features for annotating the open web and stores notes in any open wiki page. ClozeFox turns any webpage into a language learning opportunity. It’s well integrated with social networking features and provides a compelling use case. Throughout the Design Challenge, Laurian Gridinoc from the Mupple project helped to fix bugs, answered questions, and was always interested in figuring out how to solve coding problems – not just for his own project. The fact that he managed to build an awesome Jetpack on top of that makes his community contribution prize even more remarkable.  The official announcement, with a description of each projects is below.

Congratulations to the three projects and all ten winners who were at the Design Camp!

So, what now? Good bye Design Challenge, Viva Jetpack for Learning!

Just because the Design Challenge ends, doesn’t mean the fun stops. As a group, we spent the last afternoon of the Design Camp plotting ideas for the future, how we run more courses for more people, how we bring new faces into this community, and how we stay in touch as a small community of practice. The fact that there is a larger Mozilla community to hook into plays an important role in this. Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs stopped by to explain the Jetpack Ambassador programme, which sparked some lively discussions and a lot of interest to get involved. And the Mozilla/P2PU Drumbeat project for hacking open web developer accreditation might provide an avenue for further course about add-on and Jetpack development.

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

Mozilla “Jetpack for Learning” Design Challenge announces winners at SXSW

Three projects of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge were awarded special prizes at the Mozilla SXSW party today. Ten projects already selected as Design Challenge winners participated in a design camp in Austin, TX over the past three days. Today three of these projects were chosen for special awards: Expression Widgets was chosen as the “best web hack”. ClozeFox was selected as “best use case” and the project leader of Mupple received the prize for “sharing knowledge with others”. You can find more information about them and download all Jetpacks from the Design Challenge wiki.

The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge supported projects that turn the open web into a rich social learning environment. Developed by Mozilla Labs, a design challenge is an innovative combination of online seminar series, programming competition and hands-on workshop. Jetpacks enable anyone who knows HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build powerful Firefox add-ons. Jetpack for Learning is a part of Mozilla’s new Drumbeat initiative and was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning program. The Design Camp was facilitated by Aspiration.

Project teams from across the world started working on Jetpack prototypes in December 2009. After the first round of seminars, ten finalists were invited to attend Design Camp, a hands-on workshop for hacking Jetpacks and the future of open education, which took place just before SXSW. The overall winners were selected by a panel of judges and the Design Challenge participants themselves.

The Design Challenge finalists showcase different ways of learning on the open web:

• Clozefox – Clozefox turns any webpage into an interactive, educational and fun language learning resource, and share your progress on twitter.
• Cohere – Collaboratively annotate the web with Cohere. Create semantic connections between annotations while discussing them with other users online.
• ExpressionWidgets – Create, capture and share web content like text and images collaboratively with Expression Widgets.
• HooverNotes – Annotate the web like a book with HooverNotes. Leave comments, highlight content and collect pieces of content from multiple sites or a single web page.
• LangLadder – Learn a new language while doing your everyday internet activities. Langladder integrates language exercises into activities like email, social networking and blogs.
• LineHive.com – Hyperlink storytelling. Create paths through the internet by grouping webpages and sites into a timeline you can share, tweet, or embed.
• Mupple – Keep best practices and experiences with Mupple by recording your web activity and sharing them with others on the web.
• Net Detective – Joe Denton is one of the best gumshoes on the force, but he can’t solve these cases without your Internet detective skills in this jetpack that turns Internet search skills into a game for kids.
• Rubrick – Create, share and reuse teaching rubrics using Rubrick and allow both teachers and students to get on the same page.
• Study Troll – Be sure you know your facts before the Study Troll comes and demands an answer in this jetpack that turns any web session into an interactive flash card quiz.

More information:

Mozilla is a global community of people creating a better Internet. We build public benefit into the Internet by creating free, open source products and technologies that improve the online experience for people everywhere. Jetpack for Learning is a part of Mozilla Drumbeat, an an emerging initiative for people who want to *use* web technology in new ways to understand, participate and take control of their online lives. At a practical level, Drumbeat community members use web technology to make things that improve and protect the open internet. They run local events where people propose and work on these practical projects. They encourage others to get involved. Mozilla helps find contributors, funds and advice for the most promising Drumbeat projects. It also directly leads a number of Drumbeat projects of its own.

The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. In 2006 MacArthur launched its digital media and learning initiative to explore how young people are changing as a result of digital media use and what the implications are for libraries, museums and schools. More information is available at www.macfound.org/education.

Aspiration’s mission is to connect nonprofit organizations with software solutions that help them better carry out their work. We want nonprofit organizations to be able to find and use the best software available, so that they maximize their effectiveness and impact and, in turn, change the world.

The selected Jetpacks support a wide range of learning activities. They help users learn foreign languages, support the development of sophisticated web-skills or turn the web into a quiz engine. A list of finalists (and all Jetpack prototypes) can be found on the Mozilla Wiki:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning

The Design Camp in March will give the selected teams an opportunity to complete their prototypes with support from some of the world’s foremost Jetpack experts. The event is co-organized by Aspiration. An overall winner of the Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge will be selected during the camp and announced at the Mozilla SXSW event.(*)

The Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge uses an innovative combination of competition, training, and workshop to build skills in web development and drive innovation for learning on the open web. Online seminars provided participants with the necessary background on extension development and Jetpack technology. An active mailing list was used by participants to discuss and solve challenge they faced. All seminars and discussion are openly available for anyone to review and help them build their own Jetpacks.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the Mozilla project and devotes its resources to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. We do this by supporting the community of Mozilla contributors and by assisting others who are building technologies that benefit users around the world. Through the Mozilla Education initiative we work with computer science, design and business schools around the world to create learning opportunities for a new generation of Mozilla community members and help to drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning. By doing this we hope to move closer to Mozilla’s broader goal of making openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life. More information is available at education.mozilla.org.

The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. In 2006 MacArthur launched its digital media and learning initiative to explore how young people are changing as a result of digital media use and what the implications are for libraries, museums and schools. More information is available at www.macfound.org/education.

(*) The Design Challenge is not connected to or affiliated with SXSW in any way.

I recently participated in the Berkman Center Free Culture Research workshop, which brought together an interesting group of free culture researchers and activists at the place where — one could argue — it all started. We were asked to prepare short essays on our key interests for free culture research, and I decided to focus on peer assessment and accreditation. Although my interest is education and not free culture per se, the mechanisms by which peers evaluate each others work, and collaboratively improve on it, lie at the heart of commons-based peer production, and are hence relevant to the broader free culture movement as well. You can download the essay from the Berkman wiki.

Together with Chris, Stian, and Joel Thierstein I wrote a longer piece on “Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education“ for the International Review on Research of Open Distance Learning (IRRODL).

The two papers provide a first impression of our thinking on accreditation in the open social education world. With support from the Shuttleworth Foundation, we will be organizing a P2PU research sandpit (in the Boston area, possibly in May 2010) for a few people who want to design what this open accreditation world could look like – and then build it. If you are working on similar ideas, or know someone who is, we’d love to hear form you. The idea is to start talking in a slightly larger group now, and then meet in Boston with the ones that want to implement what we come up with.

I’d like to close by saying -> Q3DFN58YF93S <- yes, I only now signed up for Technorati.

Governance

As open communities grow, governance becomes a (fascinating) challenge. If you want to scale, and P2PU does want to scale, you need more people to feel ownership and take responsibility. That can be scary for the people who started the project, because how do you retain focus as more people with more (and different?) ideas arrive, and how do you preserve a sense of common values and culture?

I spent some time investigating how open source communities deal with issues of governance to see if we can learn from their experience. There is a great video on poisonous people in open source communities, which touches on a lot of issues that are relevant to governance of P2PU, although I think it’s better to frame the topic in a positive way. Rather than fighting against poisonous participants, it’s really about creating a healthy open source community. The video is long, but worth watching if you have an hour over lunch or so: http://sites.google.com/site/io/how-open-source-projects-survive-poisonous-people

The difference between decisions and discussion

It’s ok to have different levels of responsibilities, but communication has to be transparent and open. People often think the essence of open source is that anyone can do anything. That is far from true. Open source projects generally have clearly defined levels of quality control and responsibility, and processes how participants can gain such responsibility. Usually, only a small group of developers has the right to “commit” new code into the core application. Other developers can submit their proposals for new or improved code, but these suggestions are reviewed before they become part of the application. Usually the developers who already have commit rights can grant similar rights to more people, effectively promoting them based on their contributions to the project.

While the core group is trusted to make decisions on behalf of the community, all discussions and deliberations that these decisions are based on, happen in the open and anyone can in fact add their voice and opinion. This is fundamentally different from traditional organization, where typically the people who make the decisions discuss them amongst each other, and then announce certain developments to the wider community. In open source projects these discussions are open to all. This provides a constant check on the decisions of the code committers, because there is no room to hide bad decisions, and it turns the role of accountability on its head. In open source, the ones who have special responsibility become accountable to the community, rather than the other way around. The only discussion that remains private, is the one focused on promoting new people to higher levels of responsibility – in order to avoid embarrassment to the individuals.

There are some important differences between software and P2PU. We don’t have the focus on a single artifact (the software code) that everyone works on, and which has to function together. The closest thing we have to software code are courses, which are typically designed by one or a few individuals, and which don’t rely on each other to function as a whole. One way we could map the concept of a core group of “committers” would be in the form of course shepherds. Only trusted community members, who have earned this extra responsibility can “commit” a new course to P2PU. I can see lots of complications with an approach like that for P2PU, but it is an avenue worth exploring.

A lesson from open source that is easier to implement right now is the opening up of discussion and deliberation. Currently, P2PU has three tiers of conversations: the founders discuss organizational questions that are mostly focused on keeping the P2PU machine running so that the community can do what they would like to do. This includes things like organizing the next workshop, the need for a non-profit organization (or not), etc.. Increasingly the main conversations are migrating from that small group to what we call the P2PU gang mailing list, which brings together people who have made a significant contribution (organized a course, helped us with licensing issues, advised on technology, etc.). We currently rely on recommendations from this core group to add new people to the list. And finally there is the broader P2PU community that would include all of the above, but also participants in courses, and potentially outsiders. We don’t currently have a space for this wide open conversation, but it is something we are building into our new web-site.

General rough consensus works

Another misconception about decision-making in open source is that all decisions happen by voting. In fact, one quote from the video that really stood out, was “If you see a community that is voting all the time, something is very wrong”. During our Berlin workshop we adopted something called the “(emerging) general rough consensus”. In all group discussion we had one note keeper, who would at the end of the discussion, list all the points that the group seemed to have consensus on. Disagreement was encouraged and if one person flagged an issue as needing further discussion then we either discussed it more or noted that no general rough consensus could be found. It sounds complicated, but worked like a charm.

Unfortunately we weren’t the first ones who came up with it. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been using a process that is sometimes referred to as rough consensus and running code to guide its deliberations on the technical foundations that keep the Internet running. If it’s good enough for the Internet, it’s good enough for us.

Culture counts

Culture is another important aspect in open source communities, and I took away two key lessons on culture form the video: One, the founders of a project create the initial culture, which ideally becomes self-selecting in the sense that people who share this culture will be attracted and feel welcome in the community, whereas people with different values and ideas will not. And second, it is important to articulate both a clearly defined (and narrow) focus and a few core values as boundaries around your culture, so that you can refer to them when needed.

At P2PU, I think we have been quite successful with the first one. It certainly felt that the community that worked together in Berlin shared a substantive common set of values and culture and was excited by similar ideas for the future of P2PU. There are always individual differences, and that is a good thing, as long as there is enough overall coherence on what we are trying to do.

With respect to the second point of articulating culture and values, I think there are some potential downsides, or rather pitfalls if it is not done carefully. I have experience discussions in the free culture movement, where attempts to define the “movement” led to fragmentation – as people tended to focus on differences, rather than commonalities. Once the conversation is framed in the context of differences, it becomes very difficult to remember that after all, we share most of the important ideas and values. Sometimes it is easier to manifest culture in action and implementation than it is to define it through a discussion. Given those reservations, I think we do need a set of shared values – broad values – that we articulate on our web-site, and Alison has started compiling a draft version of what that could look like.

The video also speak about paying attention to newcomers and that is something we decided to start doing more seriously, both in the form of someone from the community welcoming new members when they create an account. For people interested in organizing a new course, we will offer an orientation — a set of pointers on how to best structure a course for P2PU, and the possibility to speak to someone who has organized a course in the past and is available to answer any questions that might come up.

The last aspect about culture that I want to mention here is the friction between growing very fast and retaining a shared culture. Nadeem who is head of development at Talis explains that take a lot of time to get to know job applicants in order to understand if they fit in with the organizational culture. He argues that it is easier to help developers become more productive, than it is to integrate them into a culture they don’t click with. Which makes me wonder how Google does this. They seem be very good at establishing and retaining a strong corporate culture even during a period of rapid growth of their community.

What started out as a few ideas around governance, mushroomed into a monster blog post. If you read all the way down to here you deserve a special treat. Here is a video about culture that highlights two important lessons: one person is enough to make a difference, and people like to do stuff together.

The Shuttleworth fellowship in three steps:

1 – Cover the basics Provide sufficient funds for fellows to cover their living expenses so they don’t need to worry about making money. Even it it isn’t a huge amount of money this takes away a big psychological weight and distraction. There is also flexibility to generate extra income if needed, because fellows are free to take on additional consulting work as long as it doesn’t distract from the objectives of the fellowship.

2 –  Give them some tools It’s obvious that there are lots of things one needs to work effectively, and many of them cost money. Computers, phones, communication and — a big one — travel just to name a few. It can be a real hassle to find the money for a new computer when the old one breaks or get funding to attend a workshop. The fellowship includes separate expense and travel budgets, which put an end to all that. There are also things that are difficult to do for individuals in start-up mode, like entering contracts with companies for services they provide to your project. The foundation can help with a few of these – it isn’t a one-stop support shop for fellows, but it makes some of the most difficult things a little easier, while you are busy setting up your own organisational infrastructure.

3 – Then strap a jetpack on their backs and hand them the match The way this works is that I can take a certain part of my fellowship grant (remember, this is my potential income) and re-invest into my own projects. The foundation then multiplies my investment by a factor of 10 or 15 (or 20, if it’s a collaboration with another fellow) making it a sizable amount of project funding. There is of course an approval process that project ideas have to go through, but it’s efficient and fast, because the overall goals of the fellowship are agreed already and the projects have to support them. For me this was the real killer – the incentive structure seemed to fit perfectly to what I was trying to do.

Benefits

Thinking about social entrepreneurship in this way has a few important benefits, both for the foundation and the fellow. For the foundation, it’s a good way to identify people who are so committed to their ideas, that they will invest their own money to build their dreams. As Steve Song — another fellow — says (at least I heard it from him first) it’s the difference between the chicken and the pig. When it comes to breakfast (eggs and bacon) the chicken is “invested”, but the pig is “committed”. The idea is to get the fellows to commit to their own projects. And for the fellows, it gives them access to seed/VC funding that would otherwise be hard to obtain. The reality of social entrepreneurship is that even the best ideas will typically not generate millions of dollars in profits, lead to lucrative IPOs or attract buy out offers from Google. In other words, they are not as attractive to a typical VC funder. There are some indications that this is slowly changing, but for now, one person with a powerful idea for social change and the passion to make it happen will typically have a hard time pitching for angel funds, which is exactly what’s needed to get going.

Photo by Marcus Ramberg (CC BY NC 2.0)

Challenges

So far so good. I think it’s obvious by now, that I am a big fan of this fellowship model, but of course there are things about it that I find challenging as well:

One year is short Once the fellowship starts, you have a year to submit your project proposals, get them approved, start implementing and — because your fellowship is reviewed for potential renewal after 9 months – even less time to show results. That’s not a lot of time, if you are (just an example) trying to change the tertiary education landscape. And while it’s good to have clear goals for the short and medium-term, it can be difficult to commit fully to the long-term if there is uncertainty about the foundation (pun intended) of your planning beyond the next 6-9 months. I am all for keeping people on their toes, but stretching the first year of the fellowship to 18 months, with a lead-in period, could be an option.

No more excuses You’re under pressure to deliver. Since most of the things that usually distract and slow you down are taken care of, there are no more excuses not to succeed. It’s up to you and with that comes some pressure to deliver something that makes a real difference. Especially for people transiting from academic posts into social entrepreneurship it can be daunting to stop thinking and writing, and start organising and doing. I wouldn’t want to change this, it’s a challenge that I am finding myself thrive on, but it is something that I hadn’t really anticipated and a bit of a culture shock. And yes, that was a huge generalisation about academia – forgive me!

Steve Vosloo, a fellow fellow, pointed me to this set of blog posts that compares different leadership development / fellowship programmes. It will be interesting to look in some detail how different initiatives do things differently – and what they find works best. And this is what a day at the office looks like!

Running a survey in 20 languages is not a trivial feat, and some of the people behind the scenes without whom this would not have been possible are listed below. They are members of the Wikipedia community and volunteered their time to translate a long (loooooooooooong) survey into a potpourri of world languages. Thank you! (I don’t have URLs for any of them, so if you are in this list, and would like a link to your blog or home-page, send me an email).

Volunteer translators:

• Jeandré du Toit
• Mohamed Magdy
• Meno25
• Toni Pulido
• Jordi Roqué Figuls
• Xavier SMP
• Zirland
• MF-Warburg
• Tim Landscheidt
• Michael Bimmler
• Arno Lagrange
• Ariel T. Glenn
• Ziko van Dijk
• Verónica Rivero
• Salvador Espada
• Sébastien Beyou
• Plyd
• Delphine Ménard
• Philippe Verdy
• Daniel U. Thibault
• Maximilian Hasler
• Rex
• Alberto
• Morris Mastini
• Federico Leva
• Hatukanezumi
• Naoko Komura
• Henrdrik Maryns
• Robin P.
• Wojciech Pędzich
• McMonster
• Jennifer Hobbs
• Thomas Buckup
• Aleksandr Sigachov
• Ilya Haykinson
• Mayooranathan Ratnavelupillai
• BalaSundaraRaman
• C.R. Selvakumar
• Manop Kaewmoracharoen
• Nguyễn Thanh Quang
• Trần Vĩnh Tân
• Ting Chen
• Andrew Leung