Cambridge, MA — Thursday, 16 June 2011 — The AcaWiki project has announced their summer drive to gather summaries for the top 100 academic papers around the world. The AcaWiki website (http://acawiki.org) features an updated logo and theme that brings it into alignment with Wikipedia and other popular Wikis. AcaWiki continues to make strides in improving global access and exposure to academic research and scientific findings. When completed this new list of top papers, along with the over 500 summaries already available, will provide a solid base to fill the needs of many students and academics doing research.

"Our goal for this summer is to collect a clear set of summaries of the top papers from every field,” explained AcaWiki’s founder, Neeru Paharia. “This is a huge task, and one that we will not be able to achieve without the active participation of students and academics from every discipline. While AcaWiki has a growing collection with well over 500 Creative Commons licensed summaries of academic papers, we want more coverage in fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, business, and computer science. In order to do this, we need leaders, and readers, in all major fields of research to join us.”

The AcaWiki project addresses two key problems in the public access and understanding of modern academic research. While the overall volume of significant, cutting-edge research is growing apace, the dissemination of important findings and results is mostly limited to traditional, subscription-based publishing outlets and peer-reviewed journals. Even research that is publicly funded is often not made readily available to the general public, while universities in developing countries are often cut off from access to knowledge by exorbitant subscription fees for standard journals. Since a lot of academic research is couched in jargon that can only be understood by experts, the problem of limited access to knowledge is compounded by a very real deficit in communication between academia and the general public, as well as between academic disciplines themselves.

AcaWiki offers a workable solution to both of these problems by making use of social software and leveraging a community of graduate students, academics, and citizens, to write summaries and long abstracts of academic papers. Contributors are encouraged to write two-to-three paragraph summaries of academic papers and contribute them to the AcaWiki pool. Unlike the original articles themselves, the copyright for these summaries belongs to the contributor. AcaWiki stipulates that all entries on the site be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so they are free for international distribution via the Internet or in hard copy. Other contributors can annotate, comment, or append information to the original entry, adding greater nuance or clarity.

Along with community leaders Mike Linksvayer, Jodi Schneider, Reid Priedhorsky and others, the open production company, Fabricatorz is improving AcaWiki and growing the project. “By updating the AcaWiki logo with the great design by Aleksander Stachurka, we hope to crystallize the reality of the project,” said Jon Phillips, Fabricatorz Founder. “And, by switching to the default MediaWiki theme, as seen on all Wikimedia Foundation Wikis, we are making it easier to be compatible with the majority of real Wiki communities and developers. We want to collect more high quality academic summaries and to encourage more students and researchers to use the site and help us achieve our goal.”

The project has released a public roadmap for the next three to six months on its website at: http://acawiki.org/Roadmap Beyond summarizing academic papers, the Roadmap is an open plan for others to help by filing bugs and developing plans for making AcaWiki a better resource and community.

Targeted List of Disciplines

* Anthropology
* Arts and Literarure
* Astronomy
* Biology
* Business
* Chemistry
* Clinical Research
* Computer Science
* Economics
* Education
* Engineering
* Geosciences
* Health
* Mathematics
* Medicine
* Neuroscience
* Philosophy
* Physics
* Psychology
* Sociology

For More Information

* http://acawiki.org
* http://acawiki.org/Top_100_Papers

About AcaWiki

AcaWiki is like "Wikipedia for academic research" designed to collect summaries and literature reviews of peer-reviewed academic research, and make them available to the general public. AcaWiki is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation.

Press Contact

* Jon Phillips, press@acawiki.org, +1.415.830.3884

Press Kit

* http://acawiki.org/about
* Release as PDF
* Release as ODT

Montreal, May 13, 2011- More than 200 active developers, artists, and attendees of the 6th Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 in Montreal were able to see the Milkymist One video synthesizer (http://milkymist.org) live for the first time, to entertain and surprise them between talks and during breaks. Real-time video synthesis with audio and video input had been available before in proprietary packages combining multiple devices and costing several thousand USD. Milkymist One combines this into a small form factor, and uses only free software and free hardware acceleration.

"The Milkymist One is the future of live performance and is the real freedom box, available now. Without a truly open hardware architecture, developers working on free and open software are going to be locked out from the future of development," said Jon Phillips, Fabricatorz Founder and Qi Hardware Co-founder. "I am extremely proud to use the Milkymist One live at the event, and explain why its so important for the future of Libre Graphics."

Phillips is giving a final keynote presentation at LGM2011 where he is presenting the future of Libre Graphics, moving from developers on desktop systems they control, to network services outward towards embedded hardware for making graphics.

Later that night, Milkymist One will be featured during the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 closing ceremony in Montreal at an event called Geepsters.

The Milkymist project is an informal organization of people and companies who develop, manufacture and sell a comprehensive open source solutions (http://qi-hardware.com) for the live synthesis of interactive visual effects for video performance artists, clubs and musicians. The project goes great lengths to apply the open source principles at every level possible, and is best known for the Milkymist system-on-chip (SoC) which is among the first commercialized system-on-chip designs with free HDL source code. Several Milkymist technologies have been reused in applications unrelated to video synthesis, such as NASA's Communication Navigation and Networking Reconfigurable Testbed (CoNNeCT).

Milkymist One is currently available in limited quantities to early adopters, and will be available later this summer for general use, at a target price of 499 USD.

Montreal, May 12, 2011 – Today at the 6th Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 in Montreal, the Open Clip Art Library along with its commercial stewards, the Fabricatorz, have launched the biggest, most featureful version of everyone's favorite public domain library of clip art, a collection that is free to use for any reason.

Lead developer of Open Clip Art Library and Fabricatorz Developer, Brad Phillips said, "This is our biggest release ever! We have fixed loads of bugs, and Fabricatorz have been leading an effort to create a traditional favorites system so all clip art may be rated by any artist. We have been actively working to close bugs and implement feature requests."

Additional features include a new sorting category, displaying on the main page, that takes advantage of the new favorites system by listing clip art according to most popular. There is now enhanced profile management capabilities and also an ability to list links to a user's different profiles. There are 50+ bug fixes on this 3.0 release that make the entire project work smoothly. And, now its easy to generate bitmap images on-demand, thanks to the contribution from user boobaloo from the project.

A major feature added in this release is the batch management action bar. This tool allows for librarians to add or delete clip art searches and tags. For normal artists (users) it allows for the ability to add to and remove clip art from collections. Collections is a feature from the last release so that themed sets of clip art are combined by someone.

As has come to be expected in recent Releases, a brand new Package of themed clip art is out. Open Clip Art Library 3.0's theme is 'Famous People', and the package contains dozens of newly created graphics for all uses, many of which have been contributed by attendees of workshops at LGM 2011.

For all users and services using the Open Clip Art Library, Fabricatorz is a commercial production company that actively adds features to the Open Clip Art Library. Fabricatorz founder, Jon Phillips states, “The Fabricatorz stand ready to add desired features like a Request System, an Artist Donation System, and a Showcase section on the site. For any businesses, services or benefactors that are interested in these features, we want to work with you to realize new features on the project.”

3.0 Highlights

* Favorites system sprinkled throughout the site
* Most popular category on the main page
* Users can add multiple links to their profiles
* Batch management (collections and clipart management)
* 2 active events, famous people, doudou linux logo
* 50+ bug fixes
* Simpler personal information management
* Embed controls for clip art

Downloads

We now provide monthly customized packages related to monthly themes. Please follow the url below to download the latest packages.

http://openclipart.org/packages

About Open Clip Art Library

Since 2004, the Open Clip Art Library (http://www.openclipart.org/) aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that may be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project are placed into the Public Domain according to the Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration. The site is powered by the Aiki Framework (http://aikiframework.org), a new web framework using the AGPL license. The Open Clip Art Library. Drawing Together.

About Fabricatorz

The Fabricatorz (http://fabricatorz.com) is a “open” production company that makes successful projects from start to finish, including development and community management. We specialize in Free and Open Source Software, Creative Commons technology, growing on-line and off-line communities in San Francisco, China and the Arab World. Our core focus is in developing software using Aiki Framework, hardware using Qi Hardware, and community-building around the philosophies of Sharism.

For More Information

* http://openclipart.org
* http://aikiframework.org
* http://fabricatorz.com

Press Contact
Jon Phillips press@fabricatorz.com
+1.415.830.3884 San Francisco + China

Beijing, Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest is coming to Beijing. The 2011 China Drumbeat is organized around the theme of citizen science on the web, and has attracted some of the world's leading developers in this field to participate. The Hackfest takes place from March 23 – 25, 2011 and is to be hosted at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

The goal the 2011 China Mozilla Drumbeat is to increase public awareness of citizen science on the web, and partner open source developers with the scientific community to build prototypes and solutions for "citizen cyberscience" in China. The Hackfest is for web developers, mobile app developers, processor enthusiasts, online game developers and virtual world enthusiasts.

The first night of China Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest, Wednesday March 23, Mozilla is hosting a Firefox 4 Release Party from 9:30 until 11:30 at the Rainbow Club. It is a night of fun, music and celebration for the global launch around the world of the most free, open and secure web browser, Mozilla Firefox. This is a free and open event, but registration is required prior:
http://mozilla.com.cn/event/25-ff4-launch-party/

The main two days of the Hackfest on March 22 - 23 are focused on "citizen cyberscience" which includes volunteer computing projects such as SETI@home, BOINC, CAS@home, and LHC@home. These projects all leverage the power of distributed computing to aid basic scientific research.

A Drumbeat Hackfest is a live collaborative event where tools and technologies that support the open web are designed and created. The 2011 China Drumbeat welcomes the participation of developers with skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, data visualization, distributed computing, mobile computing and online gaming. Participating developers can take advantage of this opportunity to aid the scientific community and increase public uptake of volunteer computing using the latest in web technologies.

The Hackfest opens on March 23, 2011 with an evening of speeches by Francois Grey, Coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and initiator of the Africa@home and Asia@home citizen cyberscience projects; as well as team leaders from SETI@home, BOINC, CAS@home, LHC@home, EpiCollect, the Quake Catcher Network Project, and the Computing for Clean Water Project. Fabricatorz Christopher Adams and Jon Phillps are also in Beijing supporting and hacking at the event with the teams and creating news.

March 24 and 25 will see full-day hackfest sessions with scientists and developers to take on new challenges and help enhance volunteer computing through rapid software and product prototyping.

The Fabricatorz are proud to be participating and supporting this event. Christopher Adams and Jon Phillips will be the master of ceremonies at the Firefox Release Party. We hope to see you there!

About China Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest

More Information in English and Chinese:

• http://mozilla.com.cn/event/23-drumbeat-en/
• http://mozilla.com.cn/event/24-drumbeat-cn/

About Firefox 4 Release Party

http://mozilla.com.cn/event/25-ff4-launch-party/

Rainbow Bar
彩虹轩酒吧

Address:
B1, Tower C, Science Plaza, Tsing hua Science Park, Wu Dao Kou
北京市海淀区清华科技园科技大厦C座地下一层

UPDATE: So many people have registered, so we had to get a bigger venue! Please take note!

Wen Jin Hotel B1, Chamber bar (The hotel is close to Tsing Hua South Gate.)
北京市海淀区中关村东路一号清华科技园文津国际酒店地下一层璨酒吧（文津酒店
在清华南门旁边）

About Mozilla Drumbeat

Drumbeat is a global community of innovators like you, building a more awesome web and world. Connect with others. Find projects that need your help. Or share your own. https://www.drumbeat.org/

About Fabricatorz

The Fabricatorz is a “open” production company that makes successful projects from start to finish, including development and community management. We specialize in Free and Open Source Software, Creative Commons technology, growing on-line and off-line communities in San Francisco, China and the Arab World. We develop software with Aiki Framework, hardware using Qi Hardware, and build communities around the philosophies of Sharism.

http://fabricatorz.com/

Press Contact

• Jon Phillips
• press@fabricatorz.com
• Global +1-415-830-8334
• China +86-187-1003-9974

Today, the Fabricatorz announced the Release of Aiki Framework 0.8, an ultra-fast and intuitive open web development framework that serves as the foundation for much of our finest work. The Announcement highlights many notable improvements to the software:

Helping to further bridge the gap between development and live site results, an SQL Query test box has been added to the top of Aiki's Admin interface. Here, site architects can run database queries and test their results before committing code to a widget.

To learn more about how Aiki Framework can increase your web productivity, have a look at the Official Press Release and download the software.