I'm in the EVA Air Evergreen Lounge at the Taipei Airport. I got bumped up to first class again for no apparent reason -- they were going to stick me in a middle seat in economy, and I squawked, and the next thing I know I've got a first-class ticket and pass to the lounge. Cool.
This has been a crazy week. As I mentioned before, we announced Wikitravel Press at Wikimania 2007. That was great: we even got mentioned in the China Times about it. The transliteration of my name in Chinese? 布拉卓姆 : that's "Bulazhuomu" or cloth-Latin-eminent-wetnurse. (Thanks for the translation, Jani.)
But my main focus of the conference was my talk -- Talks/Wikimania2007. I talked about Enhancing wiki with social networking tools -- by which I mean social software. We'd done a decent job with this with Wikitravel Extra, but I've been working on a new project called Keiki with some friends, and we decided it was the right time to demo the tool for people. So it was a lot of hacking and negotiating over IRC right up until the talk to get things right for our first debut.
Per the Keiki About page: Keiki is a project to create a free, complete and reliable parenting guide covering all stages of development, from conception to college. It is written by people who care about kids and want them to thrive: parents, grandparents, and teachers and parenting professionals. The manual we create together is available under a liberal copyleft license to make it easy for people to get and share the guide.
Keiki means "child" in Hawaiian. Since wiki is also a borrowed Hawaiian word, we thought it was a good fit.
The project itself is the fruition of several years of work by myself and Maj and people we've met and like in the wiki world. When Wikitravel became my full-time work, we were just getting used to being new parents, and our needs for buying travel guides was far outweighed by our needs for good parenting books. Talking to other parents, we found out that there was a lot of great information out there, but it was hard to get in one place. So kei.ki was born: a source for great child-raising information, free as in freedom.
I hope the site becomes as important as it should be: after all, we're creating the Free training manual for the hardest job there's ever been.
tags: keiki wiki parenting wikimania2007
On Wikipedia Weekly
I lucked out and got interviewed on the awesome podcast Wikipedia Weekly, too. Their Interview with WikiTravel’s Evan Prodromou is pretty good. I'm pretty happy with it.
tags: wikipediaweekly wiki wikitravel keiki