Citizendium Blog

WatchKnow, the nascent free educational video project, has decided to let you choose the topics for our summer contest entries; prizes range from $25-$300 per winner. I’ve taken the opportunity to replace the earlier video with a shorter, better-produced version:

Here are the “open submission” rules and other details about the summer contest.

General project info is still at watchknow.org.

Please spread the word among your teacher and edtech friends!

We’re giving away over $1000 in prizes for educational videos this summer, as part of a WatchKnow “pre-contest.” Here’s a video I just uploaded to YouTube about it:

Here are the contest topics and rules.

Comments on the contest topics and rules still welcome.

Hello, any coders out there!  Today, we spent many hundreds of dollars posting ads for the WatchKnow programmer position.  Can you help get the word out? Can you post this in your networks or send it to friends?

Here’s a copy of the job ad…which I posted to craigslist San Francisco Bay Area, even though I’m located in central Ohio.  The point is that I don’t really care where you live, as long as you can do the job. Being in the U.S. is probably a requirement, but beyond that, hey, telecommute from Alaska!  It’s a 3-4 month contract job, and may work into permanent employment, and it will pay pretty well.

UPDATE (June 20): yay, we now have a good set of candidates to choose from…

We’re now starting to spread the word about a major new Citizendium program. This initial announcement is meant to be low-key (no press release yet). I wanted our “Citizens” to be the first to receive it.

WatchKnow will be a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video contest. It is currently under planning and development. See http://www.watchknow.org for a long FAQ.

Here’s the basic idea. Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public schools. WatchKnow will be a free (open content), non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall, to see whether we can create that. We will set the topics and invite teachers–and everyone–to submit videos. Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point, we’ll select a winner for each topic. We’ll pay the winner(s) within each topic a small prize(s), such as $75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly yet. We might award substantially more for certain topics. You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers, but we are not affiliated with American Idol. The project is being carried out as a new program of the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American education.

We hope to launch the beta project this fall. We will be spreading the word this summer, to attract school teachers and others to help staff the program in various ways. We hope within the next few weeks to hire a technical person to actually build the beta system. See the ad here.

 For future updates, please add yourself to the announcement list.  You can discuss the new program here on the CZ forums.

I have been asked to lead the program. So, you wonder, why have I agreed? First, the aforementioned Memphis philanthropist has been very generous in supporting the Citizendium, as an incentive to us to work on this project. (He doesn’t want to be named, by the way.) He has been very persistent for over a year in recruiting me (and us) to get this project started. Second, it is largely in keeping with our overall mission of bringing online communities together, to create reliable, free, and (broadly) educational content.

I suppose it’s often this way in life–you start out doing one thing, and you find yourself presented with excellent reasons to branch out into something else.

If you are worried that this means I’ll be quitting as Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium soon, please don’t. I’ve in fact been working on both projects for several months now, spending *most* of my work time on CZ rather than WatchKnow. One exciting thing about this project, as an opportunity for us, is that, if it succeeds very well, it might bring large amounts of relatively “permanent” funding from a whole variety of sources. There will be no shortage of funds for a really useful free educational video project. As the parent project of WatchKnow, CZ naturally stands to benefit. Already, we can tap the WatchKnow engineer to serve a System Administration role for CZ as a whole. A successful beta project will no doubt provide us the funds to do something that I have been concerned that we wouldn’t be able to do: actually pay my successor a suitable salary!

Besides, once the system is off the ground, it should largely “run itself” and require relatively little work from me. If it doesn’t–if it requires heavy management–we’ll hire someone to do that.

CZ’s Executive Committee already knows about the project and has given our involvement their blessing. Several members have been rather enthusiastic about it. We have also received advice and help from a number of other people, including two “big names” in the world of free culture–but I will not release their names until the entire new WatchKnow Advisory Committee is constructed. We’ll be looking for interested and suitable members of that Committee–i.e., distinguished educators, ed tech gurus, and free content advocates.

I think WatchKnow will be good for CZ in another way. While we’ve been doing all right so far this year, we have not had a real “shot in the arm” in terms of the sort of announcements, press attention, and active recruitment efforts that punctuated our earlier months. WatchKnow will not only put CZ’s name back in the news, it will demonstrate that we are still very much active, expanding…and funded! Finally, think of this: the video project might end up being very high-profile. There’s reason to think it will; so far, everyone who hears about the idea loves it, and the idea is totally innovative and fills a gaping hole and need. If WatchKnow is very popular, it will help boost CZ, and vice-versa. So, in sum, I’m very comfortable with this as move strategically.

Again, here are the key links:

• FAQ
• Mailing list
• Discussion forum
• Engineer/sysadmin ad

See: http://columbus.craigslist.org/eng/713663956.html

Video programmer/system administrator (Columbus area and telecommute)

Reply to: sanger@citizendium.org
Date: 2008-06-09, 2:33PM EDT

JOB SUMMARY. The Citizendium Foundation (http://www.citizendium.org/), an operationally independent project of the non-profit Tides Center, is looking to hire one full-time contractor to perform two main jobs: (1) primarily, construction of an innovative online video system in something like the YouTube vein, and (2) part-time, on-the-side system administration of the Citizendium servers. The job will last from the project design, coding, and testing through a time-limited beta project, i.e., probably nine months at least, possibly to become permanent. You will be answering to the project director, Larry Sanger (http://www.larrysanger.org/), founder of the Citizendium and co-founder of Wikipedia, and working with a large variety of volunteers. You’ll work from home or from your office, but if you are in the central Ohio area, we’ll meet from time to time.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE WITH:
* Set-up and/or management of online video systems, and the problems of such systems, including traffic and multiple file types. You will be coding up, or adapting, an open source video application virtually single-handedly. This is the top requirement.

* The technical implementation of Web 2.0-type and AJAX-type methods, and of course all languages and standards needed for such methods.

* User management systems/login systems/advanced identity management.

* Significant professional experience doing various Linux system administration tasks, including server configuration, e-mail administration, restarting the wiki server, etc.

* Independent work habits, willingness to work carefully to spec, extremely good ability to analyze English and discuss details of innovative projects. But note that we are very open to good ideas and will ask you to be creative.

Essentially, you must be able to prove that you have already successfully designed and implemented a video system similar to the one we’re asking you to build. If you haven’t, please don’t apply.

A DEFINITE PLUS FOR EXPERIENCE WITH:
* Documentation best practices.

* MediaWiki coding.

* Work (either as volunteer or as paid project manager) with open source and open content communities.

* Creation of videos/videocasting.

* Ed tech and state standards.

* Enough PostgreSQL to do simple commands.

Location in the central Ohio area is a strong plus, but we will seek elsewhere if the advantages are significant. We hope to hire and get started ASAP. In any case, the contractor will be required to give brief daily reports on progress.

WHY IS THIS AN INTERESTING OPPORTUNITY? This is a remarkable opportunity for the right person. This as-yet-unannounced open content video project and expert-led, real-name wiki encyclopedia project are or will be the first two of their kind. They are both currently directed by Larry Sanger. The video project is funded by a retired Memphis millionaire philanthropist, so you need not worry that funds for your work will dry up in the start-up period. This might well become a high-profile project with high name recognition. If the project succeeds and you do well, you will probably be invited into a more permanent (e.g., employee) relationship. Moreover, we will give you an opportunity to stretch as a professional, as the projects do or will make use of several first-time innovations (it’s not just a YouTube clone), and you will be invited to work with Sanger and others in the general design of the system. If the project succeeds, as we believe it will, there is a chance that it will pioneer an unusually compelling new model for online community content creation. It will also be very beneficial to society, as you will discover as you learn more about the project.

TO APPLY. To apply and/or make a bid, please send the resume of the person who will be doing the work, as well as links to samples online of that person’s work, rate/fee requirements, and date when available. Feel free to explain any weird stuff we might encounter when we google you. Since this is contract work, responses from individuals and from technical firms are both acceptable.

* Location: Columbus area and telecommute
* Compensation: commensurate with experience
* Telecommuting is ok.
* This is a contract job.
* This is at a non-profit organization.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

The Craigslist ad: http://columbus.craigslist.org/eng/713663956.html