 We have Ricardo Iacunetti, he's a KDE contributor and developer since more than 10 years now. He started at age 14, so in what in that? He's a Plasma Core developer and he's also collaborations with Sam and other research institutions. And now we will present his latest project, the Wikia FM. I would like to change the way higher education is delivered and is taught to students. Not only to students, actually, but also to researcher, professor, and continuous learner. And to explain you this, I want to tell you a story today. A story about how a group of students from physics and mathematics in a university, in an Italian university, are trying to make an impact and to change how the work does its things. To open up. This is a picture from 1967 of MIT in a classroom. This is the same classroom in 2015. Can anybody tell me what changed? No clues? Personal. Well, to see here, the professor here has a document. Here, just where's the number? Just go to the stage. You can see how that could be a problem. We have some space for innovating here. I would like to ask you, how many of you are or have been university students here? But the greatest majority, I would say. Then second question, pardon me. How many of you have always been in the university, new all the time, what you had to do for an exam, had all the lecture notes collected in one easy place? Anybody? Exactly. I always failed at that. I was absolutely terrible. I usually spent most of the biggest part of my study for my exam in actually collecting all the material that I needed, all the lecture notes. I had good friends, fortunately. So we could exchange notes and we could confront each other on what we had to do. But it was very, very suboptimal. We had a few forms of communication, such for example, we had a Facebook group. But you know what problems there are in a Facebook group. First off, it's Facebook. So it's not open source. If not, everybody has Facebook. Also, the way you can communicate on Facebook is limited, you don't have thread, you don't have any way to store permanent content. What would have you done? What would have any first offer developer have done? Say, well, I can install my own software. I can start a witty. It was a private witty, but it was a great success between my fellow students. Because we could write down everything. Just, we were about 50, 60 people, so I just needed one to remember everything. And we could collect good knowledge. We also use it for things like writing down the most common questions of the professors, since it was a private witty anyways. And it started to be moderately usable. Now, fast forward of six months. Everything changed. And we started having the first ideas that I'm presenting now, here today. For our course, a course of advanced calculus. It was extremely well made. But so well made that the professor was teaching us how to do calculus. Was giving us exercises that not even the assistant was able to figure out how to solve. So we were in trouble. We were going to have an exam after four or five months. And we had no way to, we didn't know at all how to solve the exercises to pass the exams. We were students who wanted to make an effort. And so we decided to learn ourselves how to make these exercises. And to write a manual, our own book, on how to solve this. Everybody was concentrating on one little part, was studying on advanced books. And I'm figuring that out. And I'm writing it for everybody, you know. At the beginning, to collaborate, I proposed, well, why don't we use GIFs, so far? But then, for mathematician and physicians who barely used Linux at that time, it was not really the best solution. So second option, well, let's try the story down the week. And there is no web page. Imagine here, there is a web page. I honestly don't know. It worked five minutes ago when it started. Anyway, we can see to that. It's close enough. This worked very well. The material was extremely high quality all my years. You said you used it, the year after me has used it. And everybody has passed the exam. And then we figured out we could extend this to our courses, which we liked, or which were particularly difficult, such as quantum mechanics. This is quantum mechanics, for example. And at that point, we ended up with a lot of material to figure out. We ended up with 15 books on different subjects, more than 2,000 pages of scientific content. And the most important thing was that this material was extremely high quality, which is high quality, exactly because we use it for studying, and we pass the exam. So we know it works. It works for a university course. Not only this, but we started to see that it was not only the people from my university who were using the content. It was also people from all around Italy. The greatest episode about this was when I went in Rasmus in Sweden for six months, and I remember meeting an Italian student of physics at a certain point, directs to me and says, oh, look. There's this amazing website. Check it out. You have plenty of things. You will use it for everything. Thank you. And so we have the idea, the idea we get there, which is what I want to explain to you today. The idea to collect in one single place all the material, all the lecture notes. Actually, even from lecture notes to textbooks, this is the range we want to text in a free and open way and collaborative way. And what we want to do is we want to answer the question, can we actually deal with textbooks? Oh, it would be nice, wouldn't it? Imagine, no textbook? Do you remember the class at the beginning? That's the way it's going to be. Instead of textbooks, we have documents created collaboratively. We have textbooks which are alive. When something new gets discovered, it can be integrated. When another university has another approach to a certain topic which can be found interested, all of these can be discovered. Textbooks can be assembled. I cannot tell you, OK, study this subject on this textbook and this other on this one. I can assemble everything. Why we could assemble everything? We are based on a few technologies which are really, really nothing new, like latex or a wiki. Another ingredient which probably has been around for more than a decade or two, students. But what Wiki FM really brings into the mix, which has not been done before, is the connection between these three things. We have some open search projects, such as Wiki University. I've checked the Italian version. It is not really, let's say, not really complete. For a physics course, that's three pages of content. We got plenty of C++ manuals, but nothing else except computer science. If we use the power of the students who are doing the work of taking the notes anyways, and we just tell them, OK, let's try to write them online. We go to the professor who writes some lecture notes and there's probably some on a PDF and a website. But it would have no problem to write them on a website. We tell them, put them together. Put them on a unique source. This, unfortunately, is much more than we, as were university students, who really do this in the free time or in their study time. But still, we have a very limited amount of time could ever think of tackling. This is really a global challenge. It's a challenge that goes beyond the Italian university. It can be embraced by everybody. And it is why we decided to ask the KDE community on incubation. We wanted to have the shoulders in order to support the weight of doing this global challenge. And KDE, thankfully, said, yes. You respect the manifesto. You are a KDE project. And we also got paid by Wikimedia Italy, which is the sister organization of Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikimedia. At this point, you could ask, OK, this is nice, very, very nice. I'm just a developer who cares. I've been a university student. I'm no longer a university student. And my answer to this is whoever told you that WikiaFM is just for the university, for example, we implemented this for the university, actually, for some research centers. Really, there's no Wikiped. OK, I really have this with demos. But I don't know why. I don't know if it's the internet or something. That doesn't show up. I think I will. Well, this one is less important. The next one, I will go to another tub and show you. You might be here with some code, some snippet of code. And it can be run inside a browser itself. You just have a C++ code. And a button run, you click run, the code gets compiled, executed, and the output is in the browser. And you say, OK, still, this is nice. It's closer to what I do, but it's not what I do. What I do is this. It's a KDE session. I develop KDE programs and applications. And I would like people to use this easier. Don't you notice something strange in this screenshot, such as this bar? You know why? Empty page, but I told you there is a demo. Because this is our lastest feature, our lastest addition. This is live version of Wikiafm. And I'm logged in. Every logged in user can see this. And you would just, you want to develop KDE? Good. You press KDE Development Image. And this is it. On another server remotely, I just got booted up private, private instance of KDE. I just logged in. This is my KDE desktop. Look, it also has compositing and open gel. And this is entirely in my browser. I can play games. So imagine here having your application, your source code, and having the possibility to have users, just a new potential developers, just go on the website. I want to develop KDE. How do I do it? I want to try out ThreadWeber. Why could it be nice? Just hold 30 examples. They don't need to download anything. They don't need to spend hours to compile the development environment or install all the development libraries. It's quite like, it's not. Where is this running? This is running in Milano. And hosting is sponsored by Gap. Loom resources, you say? Of course, this is very resourceful. Well, this is an actual quote from a private conversation with one of the managers of this institution. So resources, no problem. We'll just do like Google. If you have more users, we'll just throw more hardware at it. So this is also nice. This is the main features of Wikifem, and I hope I introduced them to you in a way that at least gave you some interest in the project. Now I want to tell you about a few other things that happened around Wikifem in the last months. The first thing that happened was this year. A new foundation, a new entity, a new institution, was started to be created in the physics world. A new institution here is missing the logo. Sorry, there is no internet. And sometimes the pictures here is the ENFN logo. I'm noticing my slides today are not, it doesn't want to work. Key people in this institution got together to try to fix a problem in the physics world, which is we are, the students that come out from the universities are not ready to work in the big experiments. They try to fix this solution by organizing summer school and excellent summer school directly as a place. But they figured out this was not really the solution because you can make a student come over and stay there for two weeks. But it would just be a very limited amount of students. And in two weeks, the training you can perform is limited. Let's say, why don't we try an online approach where we have lectures, our lecture from our training, which is for sure at a top level, but that everybody can consume around the world. Every interest that a student can consume. And then we're looking for a platform to say, what do we can we host this? We need a place which is civil, usable, but still has some effort in training. Well, the solution was obvious. Wait a minute, let's start to contribute. Look, this is, oh, this works. Good. This is the web page, the live web page of HEPS upper foundation, where they are populating everything. They just started. They started not even a month ago, so they don't have everything yet. But they're starting to populate all the training material. We could prove to be a very valuable addition, because if you have people from this institution providing direct training on this KD platform for everybody, it's increasing visibility. It's a win-win for everybody. And what about the rest of the world? This is great for physics. I mean, with this, it's got high-energy physics, probably got astrophysics also. But what about the rest of the world? Well, this is just an initial plan for what we have right now. In September, we already have organized three seminars, three official seminars. One is going to be at CERN, where we're going to officially present it to the scientific community. One is going to be at Fermilab, the equivalent of CERN in America. I hope this recording doesn't go to them, because if I call them the equivalent of CERN, it's like, just bury me for this one. And another one in Chile, with the presence of the major Chilean universities and the Chilean government, who seemed very interested in Wikifem. This is for September. It's quite a big business schedule. October, we're going to speak with these other universities. We're going to start in Milano-Bicocca and experimentation, where the professors will go to the students and will ask them, please take lecture notes directly there. We'll try to institutionalize this so that more and more people are writing on this. And we are in contact with these other universities, which might or might not start this same experimentation. That's something we're doing right now, just speaking. But all these contests are coming in every moment, because every professor we speak to, every institution, they're really, really happy. It seems like that's what they were looking for, since years. And we're just now providing it to them. November, we don't know. Do you have context? I was talking with San Juan Rade. He told me he would be very, the new board member. He would be very happy to have the same thing in this university. A colleague yesterday was asking him the same question of mathematics. So I say university, why not? I've been talking to the people, to the organizers, so this university, the GPOL, they also told me, oh, that would be interesting to have this thing in our university, too. So we don't know. But at least I hope that by December, we achieve world domination at least for training. In this meantime, we're going to have some development continuing. But more important than development is spreading the world. As I try to make it clear to you, which event is less about quoting? It's also about quoting, because we support some beautiful features to allow people to write chapters of books and remix them and give everybody the freedom to take different parts and remix them. But spreading the world, going to university, going to professors, going to the people who are already doing the work and just telling them, don't let your work be rotten somewhere on a server or unknown. Make it public, share it, collaborate with other people, put it on a single platform where it can continue to be useful. So let me get out. All of what is changed before was made by less than 10 students, hard as in any open source project to say the exact number. Who have been working in about 1%, 2% of their study time, just putting things online instead of writing them on paper or on their own computer, maybe so just figuring out a little bit how to use media weekend. It has been in time and only. And what it has led to, so it's a very limited premises, what it has led to is 2,000 pages of high quality material, more than 200 users per day, unique users per day. The interest of laboratories such as CERN, Fermilab, seminars in Chile, other content, it's huge. So my real question, my real question for you is, with the help of KDE, can we do more? Thank you very much. I'd like to ask what was the relation between Wiggy FM and Wiggy Books, because it's sort of like related thinking by different people? Actually, our real competitor is not Wiggy Books, it's Wiggy Books. The solution to this question lies in the slide where there is a triangle and a written connection under it. Wiggy Books has a wiki, has not related with some form of latex, but it doesn't have students. It doesn't have universities. What figured out is that, unfortunately, the academic world is very, very close in itself. It doesn't really know much about what is going on in the rest of the world. And let's call that a report, so you show it to them. An example of this is the Italian wiki university, which I checked out, because it's kind of our direct competitor, even if we got baked by Wiggy Media Italy, which should be on the other side, so it's not really competing. And it's really tragic, the situation there. We have no content, nobody even thinks about going there and putting their material. So if it's born in the academia, you have way more contact and way to have people contribute to this. The second way to answer this is technical. It's a minor detail, but unfortunately, wiki university, since it's a wiki media foundation project, has very, very strict requirements on a software that can run on it. And sometimes, this additional software is very useful for training, such as, for example, a document like this one here, requires. Number of equations, requires references, requires. This is a line environment. Media wiki, the media wiki that is a wiki media foundation doesn't want to support this by design. Another question which was made to me was, do we support UML? Yes, we can support UML. We can add extensions. We can add all these kind of features that are essential for training. They're not essential if you want to be an encyclopedia, of course. But when you want to build a book, a book like a textbook, you don't really need these features. So these are the two sites that differentiate us. Can you answer your question? OK. No more questions? So the teachers, the professors were all OK with publishing their lecture notes to the world. Because if I remember correctly, from my days, the teachers had some of the professors were a little bit protective about their lecture notes. It depends. You have, of course, every time we published them, we were careful to go to the professor and ask. There were professors who were saying, yeah, sure, go public. Everything, no problem. I also give you the things I wrote. You can do whatever you want with them. Some others would say, which were a little bit more worried, that they would say, you can publish them, but don't say it was me. It's unofficial, because, of course, they had no control over that. Others have told us, do it, and then you can put my name or you can say, I also check them. When you finish, you'll give me the PDF. I correct it. And we'll do a real work. So it's mixed things. Nobody ever stopped the students to write their own lecture notes in their summaries, of course, because I'm not really sure they were allowed to. But of course, you have different reactions. There were one of the real strengths of Wikifem is that you don't really need every professor to help you with that. You need one professor for every course, maximum. And I think if you take all the university or the student population, you really can do that. Another question, which license do you use for the content published? It's GNU, FDL, and Creative Commons by ShareLite. I don't remember if it's FDL or GPL. Anyway, it's exactly the same license as Wikipedia. So the idea is attribution, ShareLite. I would like to remind everybody we're going to have a call. Monday, 11 o'clock. It's a busy hours. We should be enough to cover any kind of topic. We can develop new languages. We can speak of the technology. We have many, many kind of junior jobs, you know, kind of areas if you're interested. Or, as I was saying in a slide before, please spread the word, because I feel that Katie is not really aware of what we are doing and why we're doing it. So please do that. Second request, you told me at the beginning you are or have been university students. You can't lie now. You raise your hands. If you can, go to your university. Go again to your university. Take one course. Take just your favorite course. It's enough. Go on the Wikipedia fan page. Add a few references to the material you really found more useful when studying. Just this. This is enough contribution to the Kickstarter project. If you want to contribute at a second level, go to your university. And speak to them briefly about what I just showed you. I can assure you I spoke with hundreds of professors until now. The reaction will be enthusiastic. And it would be a great contribution to WikiaFM and Katie. This is it. Thanks.