As of today I’m working for the Wikimedia Foundation as developer. I have a 3 month contract, after which I’ll participate in GSoC 2010, and do a project for … well… Wikimedia Foundation 🙂 (I’ll post more about GSoC 2010 later on, I have a really awesome project planned :d) Although the payment is pretty regular for this type of dev, I think it’s completely awesome to work for a mission based company with as objective to make knowledge freely available to everyone, create completely open source software and work with really enthusiastic and talented people.
The project I’m going to start with is the Wikimedia Storyboard, which will take the form of an extension. The idea is to develop a fundraising landing page on http://wikimediafoundation.org/ with moderated but up-to-date stories from users and donors explaining the role Wikimedia has played in their lives. The motivation of building such a landing page is that donor and supporter stories can help to convince and persuade people of the impact an organization is having. It’s essentially an extended, moderated version of the real-time contribution history.
I’m hoping to get this extension finished in a bunch less then 3 months, so I can also do other stuff before GSoC. I’ll only be working part time on this though (~3hours/day), and will also be doing work on Semantic MediaWiki for KIT as well as other projects, such as Maps and Semantic Maps 🙂