Martin Cleaver Toronto, Canada
Well, the deadline for posters has just passed, and for sure we have some interesting titles!
I won’t tell you who submitted what because until we’ve read them and made commitments I can’t promise they will materialize. But, I will go so far as to whet your appetite!
- Javascript-standalone, extensions for Firefox, new visuals to represent changes, Printability, Collaborative Translation, Citation extensions
- Wiki intranets, Open Assessment, Maturity Models, Innovation Processes, Social Semantics, Analyzing large wikis
- Specifics for the Heath Sector
Notable, was that in addition to research contributed by our university crowd, are the companies submitting works to WikiSym Demos and Posters. These include: BT Group, Bosch, Microsoft, Vodaphone, and Sun – their offerings are certainly testament that cutting-edge firms are breaking ground with wikis.
However, I must say I’m surprised. So far I’ve not seen any demo and poster submissions for Workflow Mashup, Knowledge Processes, Dashboard display for Strategy and Governance, Human resources, or page-consistency mechanisms. I haven’t noticed any submissions relating to hosted consumer services such as WetPaint, WikiSpaces, etc. nor specifics for other industry verticals such as Oil & Gas, Accounting & Legal, Business Process Re-engineering.
Mind you, I’m not privy to everything, and I am told there are more than 50 paper submissions and several WikiFest / keynote submissions (none of which I can see!). I do hope that many of those submitting papers will also consider a demo or poster so they can talk through their work with small audiences, after all it’s at the few-person discussion level that the real blending of perspectives occurs, for this seeds feedback that influences direction.
Deadline extension: 30th June
While the poster submissions rolled in I was away at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston (indeed quite a few wiki vendors were there). Among the submissions I received by email were deadline enquiries such as this one:
Just to clarify, the deadline for submitting a poster proposal is June 30th? This is the date I find here: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2008/index.php/Submissions/Posters
But, on the MainPage, I read the deadline as June 11th.
— Ian Pye, University of Santa Cruz, California
This discrepancy was my fault but the Symposium Committee concluded that we both should and do have time to honour the June 30th Deadline (demos are quite lightweight so won’t massively affect the print cycle).
So come on you wiki aficionados. The beautiful city of Porto awaits your demonstrations of wiki-love.
On why you can’t see the 50 papers that have been submitted to WikiSym:
In scientific conferences, research submissions are confidential until the paper is either published or rejected. Confidentiality is important for many reasons and has many facets.
Being the first to publish a result, for example, may have very real consequences: I have a colleague who lost TWO separate dissertation topics when other mathematicians discovered and published his result before he could complete his thesis.
For more on how program committees operate: http://www.markbernstein.org/May0801/WikiSymPlanning.html
The system evolved in this way to encourage people to publish; the dissemination of knowledge is the core value in play here, and in this case it trumps transparency.
Thanks Mark (Mark is Chair of the WikiSym 2008 Program Committee),
You know what, I agree. Confidentiality wins here because of the process needs of the academic community.
It’s fabulous that WikiSym is in a position to reveal such large amounts of quality cutting-edge research and we have the accolade of reviewers to ensure quality right. For details, I just have to wait.
We’ve got George Landow, who wrote the first paper on hypertext rhetoric, and Cathy Marshall, who started spatial hypertext.
Perhaps you can give us a teaser though, Mark: what subject areas are covered and do we have more big name firms involved in the Paper track.?