WikiSym 2009, Closing Keynote, Tuesday October 27, 2009

Speaker: Brion Vibber (CTO, Wikimedia Foundation)

Abstract: Collaborative communities such as those building wikis and open source software often discover that their human interactions have just as many scaling problems as their web infrastructure. As the number of people involved in a project grows, key decision-makers often become bottlenecks, and community structure needs to change or a project can become stalled despite the best intentions of all participants. I’ll describe some of the community scaling challenges in both Wikipedia’s editor community and the development of its underlying MediaWiki software and how we’ve overcome — or are still working to overcome — decision-making bottlenecks to “maximize community throughput”.

Speaker bio: Currently CTO and Senior Software Architect for the Wikimedia Foundation, Brion Vibber has spent his career since 2002 growing up with Wikipedia’s community and software development. He lives in San Francisco in his native California, but still misses the Florida sunsets from his time at Wikimedia’s original offices in St Petersburg.

More information

You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009, Opening Keynote, Sunday October 25, 2009

Speakers: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, IBM Research

Abstract: Visualization is often viewed as a way to unlock the secrets of numeric data. But what about political speeches, novels, and blogs? These texts hold at least as many surprises. On the Many Eyes site, a place for collective visualization, we have seen an increasing appetite for analyzing documents. We present a series of techniques for visualizing and analyzing unstructured text. We also discuss how a technique developed for visualizing the authoring patterns of Wikipedia articles has recently revealed the collective lives of a much broader class of documents.

Speaker bios: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are research scientists in IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. Viégas is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg’s visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. Both Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the “history flow” project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the power of web-based visualization and the social forms of data analysis it enables.

More information

You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

WikiSym 2009 is shaping up nicely; we’ll soon be providing a first glimpse at the program. For now, here are the confirmed speakers, more to follow:

• Fernanda Viegas, IBM, and Martin Wattenberg, IBM, on Many Eyes, Visualization, and Wikipedia
• Brion Vibber, CTO, Wikimedia Foundation, on Community Performance Optimization
• Barbara Liskov, MIT, presenting a lecture repeating her Turing Award acceptance speech (via OOPSLA)
• Tom Malone, MIT Sloan and Center for Collective Intelligence, on the Future of Work (via Onward!)

We are very excited to have these speakers present at WikiSym 2009!