The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit parent company of Wikipedia and its anyone-can-edit brethren, announced on Monday that it has begun its annual fund-raiser. The organization has said that proceeds from the fund-raiser, which runs through December 22, will be used to pay for technological and corporate improvements as well as program development--specifically expanding its operations to global regions and languages that are currently underrepresented.
"We believe that everyone in the world should have access to education, regardless of race, nationality, gender, age or economic background," Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales, who also started a for-profit spin-off, Wikia, said in a statement. "We also believe that everyone has knowledge to contribute. Through the public's support and the Foundation's continued efforts, we expect to have a similar impact on communities in the most remote areas of the world as we have in more developed parts of the globe."
For example, the Wikimedia Foundation--which recently relocated from St. Petersburg, Fla., to San Francisco--will hold an event in South Africa in November with the aim to expand Wikipedia's reach among African languages.
Exact data from last year's Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser is not yet available because the organization does not expect its audit for the 2006-2007 fiscal year to be finished until late November. The Wikimedia Foundation is not announcing a target for this year's fund-raiser but has stated that its 2007-2008 operating budget is $4.6 million.
Today, Google is opening up its educational tier of Google Apps to nonprofit organizations within the United States. Registered 501c3 nonprofits will be able to use and deploy the educational version of Google Apps, which gives organizations unlimited users, free phone support, API integration, and e-mail migration (to transfer existing in-boxes to the Apps version of Gmail).
The company made the announcement this evening at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA where several nonprofits--including Mercy Corps, Idealist.org, NTEN, and the East Bay Community Recovery Project--announced their planned adoption of Google Apps.
The move is the latest in Google's public service programs, which include Google Grants and Google Earth Outreach.
At an event in Google's New York offices on Tuesday, the company unveiled a new initiative to make its Google Earth geography software a more accessible tool for nonprofit organizations.
"We're now officially launching a program called Google Earth Outreach," said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps. "Google is stepping up and validating this as a bona fide program that will be staffed in our group."
Google Earth Outreach is now live, and several downloadable layers from the program's inaugural partners--the Global Heritage Fund, Earthwatch and Fair Trade Certified--are now available online.
The new Outreach program came about, according to Google executives, because the company saw the diverse range of ways that the software was being used. "We just completely didn't see the majority of uses for Google Earth," Hanke said. "I think it's blown away everybody on the team."
Nonprofit uses, particularly those pertaining to environmental and humanitarian causes, have proven to be one of the most prolific uses for the software. "We think that the technologies we're developing can be an important catalyst for education, for sharing information, for advocacy, to address global and local issues that affect everyone around the world," said Elliot Schrage, Google's vice president of global communications and public affairs.
Organizations can now apply for grants for the Google Earth Pro program, which normally costs $400 per person per year, as well as technical support for its Keyhole Markup Language, which Hanke described as "the HTML of marking up the Earth. It's pretty easy to use," he added, "but it's a new thing, so it needs to be explained."
The wildly popular, information-heavy Google Earth software has not been without critics who have suggested that perhaps it's unwise to make so much detailed mapping data freely available over the Internet.
In response, Google has repeatedly stressed that the benefits of the Google Earth software outweigh the drawbacks. Over the past year, different organizations have utilized the tool as a way to promote tourism, animate the spread of a hypothetical virus and highlight architectural marvels.
In April, Google formally partnered with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to create downloadable map layers to help visualize the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.
It was the success of the Darfur layer, which Schrage described as "an incredibly vivid, powerful way of informing people what is going on in a faraway part of the world," that ultimately convinced the company to devote more Google Earth resources to the nonprofit initiative. "We believe that Google Earth can revolutionize the way people see the world around them," he added.
The announcement featured a videoconference appearance by legendary activist and humanitarian Jane Goodall, whose Jane Goodall Institute has been using Google Earth as a tool for some time now.
"When I began in 1960, my tools consisted of a paper and a pencil," she said to the audience. "That's putting the Jane Goodall Institute into a whole new era, and it's a very, very exciting era...it's certainly helping us hugely with our conservation efforts." Thanks to Google Earth, the Jane Goodall Institute now has a "geoblog" that's "a soap opera for wild chimpanzees."
Hanke said near the end of the event that footage of the conference will later be uploaded to the Google-owned YouTube video-sharing platform.
A piece of land owned by Hewlett-Packard since 1963 was sold to two nonprofit groups for $4 million, according to the Associated Press.
The 534-acre property, known as Little Basin, is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains and has long been used for company picnics, events and camping trips. The land is reportedly worth $13 million, and HP says it is selling it because the company's employees are not all located in or near the PC maker's San Francisco Bay Area headquarters.
"It's not a cost issue. Basically we had a minority of employees who were getting a benefit that wasn't consistent across the company," Steve Brashear, HP's vice president for real estate and workplace services, told the AP.
The new owners are two Bay Area nonprofits, the Sempervirens Fund, and the Peninsula Open Space Trust. Both say they will work with the state government to make the property open to the public as a state park.
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