Day 323 – November 19th – TED

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a small nonprofit. It acts as a global set of conferences curated by the nonprofit organisation ‘The Sapling Foundation‘. It all started out as a one-off conference in 1984 that brought together people from the three worlds of technology, entertainment and design.  Since then they have expanded and now have two annual conferences, addressing an increasing range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture. Also, since 2006 the talks have been available to view for free on their website.

TED believes in ‘ideas worth spreading‘. Their mission stating:

‘We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other‘

They have had a vast range of speakers at their conferences, including Bono, Al Gore and Stephen Hawking. These are some of the world’s greatest mind and most inspirational public figures, showing the impact that TED has on the world and the further potential available.

To find out more about TED, you can go here. To get involved and help spread their ideas, click here. To register to TED on their website, go here. If you would like to contact TED, you can go here.

Day 307 – November 3rd – Wikimedia Foundation

The ‘Wikimedia Foundation‘ is an organisation that heads many free-content projects across the web. It is a non-profit charitable corporation with the mission to ‘empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.‘

Perhaps the most notable of the projects that the foundations supports is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, which is the 5th most popular website in the world. It acts as an excellent source for reference for students and even just for people wishing to learn a little bit more about something in particular. There are many other projects, though, such as:

• Wiktionary – a free dictionary
• Wikiquote – a repository of quotations
• Wikibooks – a collection of free e-book resources
• Wikisource -a collection of free and open texts
• Wikispecies – an extensive species dictionary
• Wikinews -a free news site
• Wikiversity – a project dedicated to research
• Wikimedia Commons – a central source for free photographs, music, videos, etc.

What makes the organisation as a whole special and worthy of recognition is that all of the projects are collaboratively developed by users, who can add or edit content to expand the libraries. All content may also be freely used, edited, copied or redistributed. They are very much community creations, written and maintained by volunteers. As founder Jimmy Wales wrote in a recent appeal: “Wikipedia is about the power of people like us to do extraordinary things. People like us write Wikipedia, one word at a time. People like us fund it, one donation at a time. It’s proof of our collective potential to change the world.“

To find out a bit more about the various Wikimedia projects, you can click here. For general information about the foundation and how it all works, you can visit the FAQ here. To help fund the organisation and the various projects that it runs, you can donate here.