About the Speaker

Samuel Klein Samuel Klein was elected to the Wikimedia Board in August 2009. He currently lives in Cambridge, where he leads local content creation and develops global advocacy for One Laptop per Child, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to providing access to knowledge and communication networks to children everywhere. He has worked with children and teachers in Peru, Uruguay, and Nepal to organize content and software jams and to teach others what they learn.. He also leads local content creation and develops global advocacy for One Laptop per Child, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to providing access to knowledge and communication networks to children everywhere. He has worked with children and teachers in Peru, Uruguay, and Nepal to organize content and software jams and to teach others what they learn.

Samuel has been involved in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for 6 years. He has spent much of that time writing and speaking about the Projects. In 2005 he published a Wikimedia newsletter in 6 languages, and served as a cross-project translation lead. He also served on the Communications and Special Projects Committees in their first year. He founded the Boston-area Wikipedia group, and organized the bid and local team that hosted the Wikimania conference there in 2006. He works on offline Wikipedia distribution, including the WikiBrowse project.

Samuel studied Math and Physics at Harvard University, and is an Associate of Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. He spent time teaching and developing software for facilitating translation and community-building before working on universal education.

More information about Samuel is available on his Wikipedia user page.

Wikipedia as a model for societal problem-solving

Wikipedia is one of the simple pleasures of the modern Internet - a free, universal reference in over 200 languages. Unlike past efforts to compile and share human knowledge, Wikipedia has been planned, written, and edited entirely by a community of volunteers (100,000 to date). It is an open collaboration that anyone can edit anonymously and directly - an idea which participants joke "works in practice, but not in theory".

Wikipedia is an example of how connectivity, automation, and changing social norms are transforming what societies can do with parallel human effort. How does this pattern of collaboration work? And where might it appear next? We will discuss the growth of the project, its foundation in good faith and a shared popular vision for society, and possibilities for the future.