Kiwix/Plan 2020-2021/Final

Welcome to this project's final report for FY2020-21! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from Kiwix' work for the last fiscal year. For the initial plan, see Kiwix/Plan 2020-2021.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

Kiwix is the leading offline solution to provide internet content to people with poor to no internet access. Chief among these is of course Wikipedia, which now can be entirely downloaded under a variety of flavours (maxi, no pictures, mini) and subsets (maths, physics, geography, etc.).

Overall, this year's project was largely impacted by two things: the continuing Pandemic, which drove usage up (most notably with a number of orgs deploying Kiwix as enquiring about deployments), and the sliding dollar which drove the resources we could allocate to these projects down. We ended our fiscal year 2020 (not to be confused with the US fiscal year, which runs until June 2021) on a significant loss, but we're still around thanks to us having some reserves exactly for that kind of situations. So while our estimated user base grew by 33%, our budget by 20%, our resources went down 10%. Rough year.

Project Goals

1. Make incremental but meaningful changes to our core products.

Priorities supported: Worldwide readership, Brand awareness

• The key to offline access is the availability of contents that are easy to find, share and use, no matter the platform. To that end, we worked to improve UI and UX designs to make content retrieval easier, and keep making sure that access to free knowledge remains possible even with lower-end devices.

We've made some significant progress on the backend, with the implementation of OPDS, but were delayed in deploying some of the coolest new features, starting with a revamped library.

2. Substantially extend the range of product experiences.

Priorities supported: Worldwide readership, Brand awareness

• We continued our industrialization of content release so that end users and partners alike could use Kiwix as the centerpiece of a rich and varied offline ecosystem of free knowledge. We missed our target of rolling out the new Content Management System that could allow for a better QA, essentially because our limited resources only let us pick vendors for specific task (as opposite to being able to drive development internally).
• We extended the range of existing commercial partnerships for the distribution of Kiwix Hotspots so that it is easier to deploy, in more places around the world: we have partnerships in the US, UK, EU (Germany). The UK vendor is actually shipping worldwide and feeding other vendors in PNG and Botswana.
• We made some progress in improving our measurements of content interaction, but a fully-automated service is still some months away.

Project Impact

What we delivered

Kiwix library before: no selector (language or other), all zim files presented as is in the order of last creation. Clicking on the box would display the file.

Updated Kiwix Library. Contents are sortable by language and type. Clicking on the box will display the content of the zim file but also allow users to directly download the zim.

• Improved UI and filtering on https://library.kiwix.org and transform it in our definitive online customer facing content store.

Up until recently the Kiwix library was more of an internal demo site, listing every single content available (whose main purpose was simply for us to do a bit of QA by displaying and browsing zim files online), to something much more actionable for everyone:

• Revamp Kiwix-desktop and -Android library management
• Improved ZIM format all around
  • ZIM reading speed has been increased by 5x
  • switching our indexing to zstd also help gain some access speed.
  • Moving to webp format allows us to save about 15% in storage
• Build content management backend system and integrate it to the Zimfarm
• Define sales and partnerships KPIs and implement reporting board
• First version of an online Wikipedia selection tool linked to our toolchain
• Offer Wikipedia mirrors (via our ZIM schnapshots) on IPFS
  • AR, EN, MY, RU, TR, ZH are now available via IPFS. Tests have shown that Wikipedia can now be accessed beyond the Great Chinese Firewall.
• Implement operational system backup strategy
• Develop business plan to build financial sustainability

Q1

•  Done
• Planning for a WP1 public selection tool  Done
• Planning for the ZIM CMS  Done
• Define sales & partnership KPIs  Done

Q2

• Mockup of library.kiwix.org welcome page 2.0  Done
• library.kiwix.org API provides all the necessary API for the catalog  Done
• Kiwix-Android library manage properly managing filters  Doing...
• First tool to rename/delete ZIM content from the catalog  Doing...
• Publish Business plan  Done
• Business KPI dashboard  Done

2021

50% grant payment

Q3

• library.kiwix.org 2.0 online with filtering allowing easy content discovering  Done
• ZIM files available on IPFS  Done
• Kiwix-Android library manage properly managing flavours  Doing...
• Proper library cache mgmt in kiwix-lib  Done
• Kiwix-Desktop library with proper flavour mgmt  Doing...
• First version of the WP1 public selection tool  Done

Q4

• Kiwix-Desktop native library  Doing...
• library.kiwix.org offers widgets for wiki.kiwix.org and www.kiwix.org  Done
• library.kiwix.org offers a way to directly download ZIM files  Done
• At least 5 Wikipedias fully available & updated to surf on IPFS  Done
• Kiwix-Desktop library with proper filters  Done
• Reliable backup strategy up & running  Done

Metrics

We estimate our user base to be upwards of four millions, worldwide.

Project resources

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

As always, all of our content is open-source and available

On Github

• Openzim repository
• Kiwix repository

On Commons

• Presentations

On Twitter

• @KiwixOffline

Our blog

• blog.kiwix.org

Next steps and opportunities

The full plan for next year (2021-22) is online and available here.

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

All amounts in CHF (CHF 1 = ca.USD 1.1)

Remaining funds

No remaining funds.