Combining projects just for fun ... and unexpected results

The story ;-)

Well time ago, when we started to work on the Destinazione Italia project with OmegaWiki I understood that professors at the University of Bamberg need free news, but they need it tagged in such a way that the studends can easily look up words with definitions and translations.

Then some weeks ... well a couple of months ago ... I wrote my first article about the tuna cages that are planned in Cetara, near Maiori, on the Italian Wikinews which lead to a contact with Maria Rosaria Sannino from eCostiera since she received the article through google alert.

Well yes, we then made an appointment at the Bar Pineta with some other people from Agorà and Positanonews. That is where I met the director of Positanonews and understood that he is a very likeminded person, thinking very open and Open Content without really referring to it. So a natural Open Source person here on the coast ... that is indeed rare.

I started to take the headlines of Positanonews for the Costiera Amalfitana Wikia and I was offered to simply use the contents I prefer ... well, no, I don't do that, I prefer to link to it and not double contents ... well yes, during the next days I will need to work on the Wikia ... I did not have much time these days and still don't have much ...

Comunication with Michele Cinque and his team developed really well and we reached two very particular results with this - on one hand a news section in Neapolitan language and on the other facilitated reading articles (the list is maintained on OmegaWiki ... another one will be added by today).

The facilitated reading articles resulted from two things:

• the need to link Neapolitan words to a dictionary in order to help people to understand the words and
• the need of the University of Bamberg, that is news with links to the terminology so that students can read them more easily and have this terminology in such a fashion that it can be easily exported from a database
  

Most of you know me quite well ... sometimes I just do things to show what is possible and then all sorts of not calculated, that is unexpected results derive from what I do.

So I created my first "Easy to read" article to show it to Martin ... now he really likes the idea and we are going ahead to do this adding one article a week. This means three very different groups of people are now connected to produce open contents for the community (in alphabetical order):

• OmegaWiki
• Positanonews
• University of Bamberg

Yesterday I took a first article from the Italian Wikinews (if you are from Wikinews, please have a look if attribution is ok in this way) which still needs to be taggen, to have some free content on national and international news in Italian with a free license, since of course Positanonews is centered mainly on regional news and all that comes from outside cannot be released under a free license unless the author does not agree to it. So we can add also Wikinews to the list above and we really have a good mix of projects from various sectors that all have the same spirit. Do as much work in the Open Source world as possible and give access to information and education to people.

Now you are eventually asking yourself why I chose this combination: well it was not chosen, it happened, just because people are open minded, have the spirit to pay it forward and do not only think about their own needs and wishes.

So thanks to all contributors from (in alphabetical order):

• OmegaWiki
• Positanonews
• University of Bamberg
• Wikinews

There will be other unexpected results ... they are already on their way ... and when time is due I will tell you about it.