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WikiSym 2009!

WikiSym 2009

This Wednesday 25th Feb marks just 8 months till WikiSym 2009. Planning is underway!

Florida! Disney!

We alternate the conference between being located in Europe and the Americas. This year we’re in fabulous Florida, Orlando to be exact, and right next to Disney World. Co-located with OOPSLA, with WikiSym starting Sunday 25th Oct 2009, and running till Tuesday; OOPSLA spans Weds to Friday.  While our membership bases have become very different (OOPSLA is purely a technology conference, but WikiSym’s growth means it constitutes typically only 1/3 technologists), our organizations’ history means we have become good at supporting one other.

Our Conference is evolving

Back in 2005 WikiSym was principally a technology conference: open source enthusiasts and company representatives discussing the technology paradigm. As the years have marched on, Wiki technology has proven itself as a cornerstone tool of Social Media because it radically changes the way society interacts. Stemming from the simplest change of easing the process of constructing interlinked documentation, Wikis facilitate a quick and easy way to document and continually refine, bringing an intranet to life with relevant and far-reaching information that addresses the “long tail of interests” of everyone who reads it.

Companies enthuse at the idea of having “a company centric Wikipedia” and, if they get the culture working, gain real knowledge retention benefits once transparency hits: processes once treated as separate domains are recognised as not just having knock-on effects but living, complex and evolving interdependancies. And once this happens, the wiki is no longer solely a technology, but a paradigmatic mechanism that enables the capture and synthesis of leading edge thought, driving company evolution, and transforming company and industry boundaries.

The very term “Wiki” has shifted from a particular type of technology to a prefix that implicates paradigm of openness, as witnessed by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams runaway hit, Wikinomics, a book now translated into more than 20 languages. WikiSym ’08 reminded the Gen Y participants that much of the content representation benefits we attribute to Wikis have been in SGML Hypertext for more than 20 years; wikis bring these benefits to the masses.

It’s a natural step to pair Wiki style  freeform collaboration with data from the backend systems in the  enterprise layering insight and rapid change with hard evidence. We saw tremendous innovations in such integrations, for example, workflowing humans to review machine-translated wiki content.

Diversity is our strength

The growth in diversity of the community at WikiSym continues to thrill me more and more each year.

WikiSym ’07 and ’08 continued to attract an ever broader diversity of audiences. From company decision makers seeking to understand how their businesses can be transformed using a wiki, researchers seeking collaboration opportunities, and wiki vendors keen to team up with their customers to demonstrate and explore the value: people at WikiSym 2008 confirmed to me that it was an amazing event to attend. Many of you will remember the video interviews I conducted: I’ll have something exciting to announce shortly about those interviews!

As the momentum grows, 2009 promises to be an even more incredible year for those of us in the industry.

Planning for 2009

Right now, the organizing committee is in the throes of planning. The Calls For Papers for 2009 is presently active: there is still time for you to create a paper for formal presentation. We are presently establishing Keynote speakers, session leaders, and all those tracks that need a team to prepare.

Are you in Florida? Do you live in or know Orlando well?

2008’s operations went so smoothly because the efforts of the University of Porto students and the coordination of Ademar and his team. Having local knowledge and an engaged local staff makes a world of difference, so we’re reaching out to universities, institutions, local companies and individuals willing and able to lend a hand with logistics. They ensure  loose ends are planned for and any issues addresses. So, if you are near to Orlando, we want to hear from you! Please, send us specific ideas about venues for events, hotels, wiki walks, or help us identify people who might be willing to help.

Best regards,

Martin Cleaver, publicity co-chair.

Head Blender, Blended Perspectives
Toronto, Canada

BT sponsored WikiSym 2008!

Sponsor, WikiSym 2008

Hello! We’re Osmosoft, the open source arm of BT. We’re a small team of techies that love open source software. We mainly work on the TiddlyWiki open source project.

A TiddlyWiki is a single html file which has all the characteristics of a wiki – including all of the content, the functionality (including editing, saving, tagging and searching) and the style sheet. It’s a single file so it’s very portable – you can email it, put it on a web server or share it via a USB stick.

And it’s not just a wiki! It has very powerful plugin capabilities, so it can also be used to build new tools. You have full control over how it looks and behaves. For example, TiddlyWiki is already being used as:

  • A personal notebook
  • A GTD (“Getting Things Done”) productivity tool
  • A collaboration tool
  • For building websites
  • For rapid prototyping
  • …and much more!

The best way to understand it is to use it! We hope you’ll check it out (you can download it below)

The Osmosoftonians

Empty tiddlywiki: www.tiddlywiki.com/empty.html (right-click and save as)

Osmosoft twitter feed: www.twitter.com/osmosoft

Video channel on Vimeo: www.vimeo.com/osmosoft

Our site: http://www.osmosoft.com/

XWIKI sponsored WikiSym 2008!

Sponsor, WikiSym 2008

One of the hottest topics at this year’s WikiSym 2008 will be application wikis.

To put it simply, an application wiki allows its users to create… applications. Why is that exciting ? Because it means users can mix both structured and unstructured freely over the same platform. Take product sheets : you might want to have both structured data (name, retail price) and unstructured data (the product description or a sales pitch). In a typical wiki, none of that data would have metadata associated to it.

This means that if you were to write a list of all the pages that are product pages, you would have to identify every one of them and list them manually on one page. Same thing if you were to modify the layout of those pages : you’d have to iterate them one by one to change the intended layout. Pretty frightful when there’s a hundred of them… On the other hand, typical content management systems aren’t perfect either. While they offer a predefined set of templates for content, it is harder to create free-flowing pages and links between those pages. Application wikis bridge the gap between those 2 types of software : they let users add freeform information while at the same time providing the ability to typify it and manage forms from a central location. Forms can be created easily and mixed with typical wiki pages and a query language provides additional power.

Come give a look to the getting started with XWiki tutorial delivered by Guillaume Lerouge (product manager at XWiki, an application wiki provider) or to the application wikis panel (where Stewart Nickolas from IBM & Ludovic Dubost from XWiki will speak) to find out more on the topic !

SAPO is this year WikiSym Gold Sponsor

Sponsor, WikiSym 2008

SAPO was born in 1995 at Universidade de Aveiro
becoming, some years later, Portugal’s leading portal, providing
internet access and web services to millions of users every day.

For years, SAPO is using wikis
internally to organize and share information among it’s teams members.
Wikis are great collaboration tools when integrated in the developing
cycle of a project for documenting purposes. They provide historical
changes, and are a natural repository for information provided by all
team members along the development process.

Some time ago SAPO started using
wikis externally, on services provided to it’s costumers and users.
Examples solutions range from knowledge sharing apps, costumer care
support solutions or to just publicize the portal public APIs
documentation.


Saber is SAPO’s Wikipedia.

The Portuguese version of Wikipedia is mainlly written in Brazilian Portuguese. Saber was based on Wikipedia‘s
contents (respecting the GNU Free Documentation License) with the
purpose of promoting the culture and knowledge from Portugal and
fomenting the writing of articles in Portuguese from Portugal. Other
localized versions were also made available to portuguese speaking
countries like Cabo Verde and Angola.

Some customizations had to be done to integrate the portal users accounts and some Mediawiki extensions had to be created to integrate other content. Scripts periodically merge Wikiipedia‘s content and pictures with Saber updates.

During the project several ideas came about. One of he most interesting
was to make available all geo-referenced articles to the community.
From time to time, all articles are scanned looking for geo-reference
info and made available to the SAPO GIS team, that makes them available through their API. Here’s an example of the POIs found on Saber versus the Wikipedia points that Google Maps reports on the same area.

Another wiki based project developed by SAPO to it’s parent company, Portugal Telecom, was Wikicare.

The main purpose here was to empower all costumers to collaborate with
each other, solving problems and make suggestions about the service,
support or billing issues thus helping Costume Care on it’s own
efforts. This wiki is still limited to costumers only, which are being
very active making contributions, but is expected to be made public in
the near future.

Wikis are a powerful and versatile tool that easily enable users
contributions, collaboration and feedback, which makes them the perfect
solution for this and future projects at SAPO.

Wiki House Party, Tonight

WikiSym 2008

Hi everyone!

The evening just before WikiSym starts, we are holding a Wiki house party, open to all: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2008/index.php/Wiki_House_Party

If you need to call someone, try talking in the WikiSym Skype Chat Channel (if for any reason you have difficulty getting in add Martin (mrjcleaver on skype)). You are welcome to phone Martin Cleaver on his temporary sim4travel UK cell +44-7509-226771 (he pays no roaming charges so you won’t incur him a cost).

Best regards,
Marc
—
Marc Laporte
http://TikiWiki.org/MarcLaporte

Implementing a Wiki within SAP’s CRM Organization

Sponsor, WikiSym 2008

Holger Junghanns, SAP AG

In 2007, I was a member of a project team that was responsible for the implementation of a wiki within the Product & Technology Unit (PTU) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) organization of SAP AG. The goal of this project was to promote knowledge transfer among the different teams involved in the development process of SAP’s CRM application.

Within a six month timeframe, our team introduced a wiki as a central point of access for internal knowledge transfer and collaboration within the PTU CRM. Prior to the wiki roll-out, a pilot user group provided continuous feedback on the prototype. Elements used to foster user adoption included the creation of wiki page templates, including a team page template, a meeting minutes template, and a wiki training cheat sheet, among others.

From a technical point of view, our project team followed SAP IT’s recommendation to comply with the standard for wiki technology within SAP. As a consequence, the PTU CRM wiki is now fully integrated into the existing wiki application within the company. This integration provides access to the wiki via the Single Sign-On capability and user support to ensure performance and sustainability of the system.

In terms of introducing the wiki to the organization, our project team conducted personal training sessions in the major CRM locations, namely Walldorf, Bangalore, Palo Alto, and Montreal. Teams that could not participate in person were provided with training sessions via video conferencing. In support, we linked training material, such as the wiki training cheat sheet, within the wiki, allowing colleagues to access it at their convenience.

One year after the roll out, our CRM colleagues actively use the PTU CRM wiki. Principle use cases include managing projects and meeting minutes on the wiki as well as building team workspaces. The PTU CRM Wiki is now the tenth largest internal wiki within SAP, incorporating more than 1,000 pages, 9,000 page versions, and 130 active contributors. Currently there are more than 1,400 live wiki spaces at SAP with more than 10,000 authors working on more than 100,000 pages. Participants of the WikiSym 2008 can get more details on this project in my WikiFest session.

—

Holger Junghanns is a business analyst on the Industry Solutions Operations team at SAP AG. He joined the company in April 2007 to write his diploma thesis, “Wiki Technology for Collaborative Knowledge Management in Corporations”. In his current role, he leads a project to implement a wiki in SAP’s Industry Solutions organization. Holger holds a diploma in Business Information Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Network Computing, both from the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology.

Dan Ingalls – Interview

Uncategorized

Daniel Ingalls is one of the most important participants of this WikiSym edition. He’s participating as an invited speaker and we interviewed him just in time to get you some information on his career.

1. When has you career in Software Development started?
Around 1970.

2. Considering what you invented, do you think that you have revolutioned computer programming and architecture?
I do feel that I’ve contributed to some good progress, but I’ve never felt it was a “me” thing.  I’ve had a lot of fun, drawn energy from the people and things around me, and I hope I’ve given back some of the same.

3. Is there anything you would still like to do, in that area, that you haven’t done yet?
I still feel that things can be simpler.  I hope that, with the help of increasingly high-level language tools, we may be gradually able to leave the language wars behind us, and move into an era of focus on the more basic semantic models, relationships, and architectures.

4. What do you foresee to happen in a near future, considering the current trends of informatics?
I believe that this trend we call “Web 2.0” will continue, as an exciting recreation of the personal computer revolution, but now in the context of dynamic languages and the web.

5. When did you start getting involved with wikis?
Around the time when Squeak came out with one of the first really simple, small Wiki kernels.  But this was not my work, except for the system in which it was built.

6. What do you think that could be improved on platforms like wikis?
I think of everything on the web as being active, so I look to the future of Wikis as being an editable world of active objects.

7. What are your expectations towards this edition of WikiSym? Have you participated on events like this before?
This is my first visit to WikiSym, and I have no expectations, except to share some of the excitement of new possibilities.

8. If there’s anything else that you would like to say, please:
Thank you so much.

Impromptu Poster? We’ll make space!

WikiSym 2008

Martin Cleaver. Chair, Demos & Posters. Blended Perspectives, Canada

I’m pleased to remind you of the great posters and demos for you this year, these get formal air-time during some tasty Portuguese “refreshments” on late Monday afternoon.

Our poster presenters, listed in the program, (and most of which took advantage of their right to be entered into the ACM) will each feature a really large poster, and many feature exciting demos too.

With the date almost on us, just 4 days away, many of our attendees are buzzing with new ideas, and, some it turns out, are asking for airtime.

It turns out we’ve got a spare wall…

SO! As we are a wiki conference, and wikis are all about providing space for innovations on the edges, let’s put something together.

Feel free to make a poster, either A2 or A3 in size, and we’ll find you a wall “on the edges”. If you are in an open space, and you’ve summarised your conversation, on a flip chart, we’ll find you a place to put that up too.

It might become a little make-shift, but it’s sure to become exciting 🙂

Any questions, feel free to ask.

Martin Cleaver.

Open Space at WikiSym

Announcement

OpenSpace is the energy of a good coffee break, with the flexible structure of wiki, where last minute, new creative ideas that otherwise wouldn’t be on the WikiSym program to be worked on by all types of wiki enthusiasts, in a format that allows deeper consideration of an issue than can be achieved with a 20 minute presentation.

As a point of reference, many unconferences are organized with OpenSpace or a variant.

While OpenSpace sessions aren’t actually scheduled until they’re on the wall during the conference, feel free to write here what you’re thinking about putting on the wall:  Possible Sessions

More to come just before WikiSym’08

Announcement, Uncategorized, WikiSym 2008

RedBullAirRace2007_00380As you may already know, one of the Red Bull Air Race World Championship’s races will happen in Porto, on 6th and 7th September. It’s one of the ten cities to host this unique event, for the second time now. The first time was last year, 2007, as was a huge sucess both for viewers, organizers and for the hosting community.

The race over the River Douro will be the eight of this season, which will be followed by a race in Spain (maybe in Vallencia, but still not confirmed, hapenning in September 27th and 28th) and the last one in Perth (Western Australia, in November 1st and 2nd).

RedBullAirRace2007_00492The race days in 2007 were compared to the S. João’s evening (in English, St. John), the traditional popular festival, in June, when thousands of people hang out on the streets of Porto and surroundings all night.

Photos: Tiago Pereira (click on the photos to enlarge)

Here’s a bit more of Red Bull Air Race in Portugal:

PORTO AND VILA NOVA DE GAIA – THE CITIES OF BRIDGES

TWO CITIES, ONE RIVER
The two cities of Oporto and Vila Nova de Gaia face each other from opposite sides of the Douro river – Oporto in the north bank and Gaia in the south. Six Pontes, or bridges, in total, join them. Of those, Ponte Dona Maria and Ponte Dom Luís, the two oldest ones, were built in the 19th century, respectively by Gustave Eiffel and by his partner in business, Théophile Seyrig. Ponte da Arrábida, Ponte de São João and Ponte do Freixo date from the 20th century, while the newest one, Ponte Infante Dom Henrique, is no older than the 21st century.
Being one of the oldest cities in Europe, Oporto is proud of its well preserved historical quarter and was awarded World Heritage Site status by UNESCO in 1996. Oporto and Gaia are further connected by the famous Oporto wine, traditionally stored in wine cellars that over the years have been built in Gaia and act as a magnet for tourists visiting Northern Portugal. There stand the names of the English families that left their winemaking mark in the Douro region over the centuries: Taylor, Sandeman, Graham or Croft, to name but a few.
Fine wine and the Douro River may be the lifeblood of the two cities, but visitors will also benefit from a widely varied cultural offer. The Serralves Foundation – with its vast collection of contemporary art and amazing gardens – the House of Music – a multidisciplinary place where you can listen to great music and much more – or Oporto Cathedral, dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, are some of the unmissable features north of the river. Also worth mentioning, on the south margin, are the Grijó Monastery (16 th/17th century), the Serra do Pilar Monastery (16th century) or Casa Barbot, a unique example of the Art Nouveau style in the city.

Oporto/Gaia – The race
The eighth leg of the Red Bull Air Race will be run over the river, in the Ribeira of Oporto and Gaia Docks area, on the weekend of the 6th and 7th September. The race course will be set between Ponte Dom Luís I and the Massarelos overpass.

This info was taken from Red Bull Air Race Official Website. Please check this website for information on accomodation, transportation to and from the places and ticket information as well. The website is available in Portuguese, Spanish, French and English.

You can also check the Red Bull Air Race Hospitality website to know more about the event.

RedBullAirRace2007_00020

There’s a magazine on each place available for download, containing information on the race, on the place and on previous relevant happenings. A bulletin will be distributed during the qualifying races and the final race days.

Photography: Tiago Pereira