Yearly Report 2009

Events and Activities

January: Project Start

The basis for the openZIM project was established during 2008 when Tommi Mäkitalo, maintainer of tntnet, created an open source version of the ZenoReader published by DirectMedia on their yearly Wikipedia DVD. This new tntzenoreader became part of the Wikipedia DVD 2008/2009 in October 2008. As the idea of having a common, free file format and tools that are open source to solve the Wikipedia offline problem spread to other projects a need of extending the works on the tntzenoreader arised.

In December 2008 the decision to found a project was made by formerly involved and new interested parties. Wikimedia CH was asked to provide funding to make the project possible: A server for development was needed as well as ressources for having regular developer meetings to keep the project alive. The swiss Wikimedia chapter agreed in sponsoring the project by giving 4000 CHF for 2009.

DirectMedia was asked if we are allowed to use their name "Zeno" for the new project, as the file format is based on Zeno. As they used Zeno as a trademark and were about to sell their portal "zeno.org" they requested the project to use another name, so we came up with ZIM as the abreviation for "Zeno IMproved".

February: 1st Developers Meeting, Official Launch of openZIM

We created a logo and started to fill our new wiki. The zim file format was discussed. For a full report of our meeting see Developer_Meetings/2009-1.

June: Participation at LinuxTag, 1st Wikipedia DVD

See LinuxTag_2009. Nice exhibition. We talked to many people about Wikipedia offline. About technology as well as the sense of having Wikipedia offline.

Outlook for 2010

Roadmap

• ZIM export in MediaWiki
• stable applications
  • Kiwix
  • Ben NanoNote
  • Okawix / Wikiwix

Events and Marketing

• Developer Meetings
• MediaWiki Developer Meet-Up
• LinuxTag
• Wikimania