ZIM Autobuild/grant request

Dear WMCH Board members

The 2011 WMCH granted Black&White project is in the last stage. It's a little bit early to assess the whole project, but until now we have been pretty successful. As it will be finished soon and we are already in April, I want to propose you the following project for 2012: "ZIM Autobuild"... and request your financial help!

Kiwix is well established by now, there are more and more users/downloads and we know that users are really satisfied. It's accepted as the reference software to read ZIM files and does more or less everything what people expect from such a software.

In comparison, the offered content is still too small. I manually prepare full Wikipedia ZIM files with pictures in about 25 languages. In addition, people can create ZIM files (until 500 articles) themselves using the book creator. This is not sufficient. Furthermore, this does not fully match our user's needs. The WMF plans to set the book creator limit over 500 articles, but this will never allow to deal with millions of articles. Concerning myself, I'm limited in time and by the weakness of the setup (the server is hosted in my living-room). In the current situation, I'm neither able to provide ZIM files of new languages, nor more up2date ZIM files.

In my opinion, this is the right moment, to fix that problem. I propose the following solution:
 * fully automatic
 * Web configurable/manageable
 * able to build full or partial (only a selection of articles) ZIM files of WMF projects
 * able to tweak the content by removing/modifying categories, templates, articles
 * able to compute full ZIM files with pictures for at least the 50 largest Wikipedia (except English)
 * able to compute full ZIM files without pictures for most of the WMF projects
 * Able to provide Sugar .xo packages including content + Kiwix (developed in the B&W scope)

Everything could be done in a pretty short time that means: we could announce the launching of the platform for the end of September if we start now.

Here are the three parts of the project:
 * Reimbursement of the server (~6500 CHF)
 * Payment of a professional hosting in Zurich (~4500 CHF *over two years*)
 * One month of code development I want to do on a volunteer base

The full project leadership, code development and future sysadmin work would be assumed by me.

I hope this request is welcome and wait for your feedback. I'm any time available for any requests concerning additional information about this project.

Best regards Emmanuel Engelhart