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.

November: 2nd Developers Meeting, Major Changes to the ZIM Format

Developer_Meetings/2009-2 The 2 major things about the meeting was the support of the Ben NanoNote platform and major changes in the file format.

2 guys from the qi-hardware team joined our meeting and we helped them to port zimlib to the Ben NanoNote.

We decided also to change the file format to support indexing by url and title. Also compression was changed from bzip2 to lzma, since lzma is faster to decompress and library support is finally good enough. We also dropped the QUnicode format inherited from the zeno file format, since it only helps to sort german data better. So we decided to simplify ordering and use simple string compare.

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