Category Archives: Announcement

Keynote Preview: Ed Chi

Announcement, WikiSym 2011

The closing keynote at WikiSym 2011 will be delivered by Dr. Ed Chi, a staff research scientist at Google and a well-known figure in the HCI community, with over 80 research publications.

Model-Driven Research in Social Computing

Research in Augmented Social Cognition is aimed at enhancing the ability of a group of people to remember, think, and reason. Our approach to creating this augmentation or enhancement is primarily model-driven. Our system developments are informed by models such as information scent, sensemaking, information theory, probabilistic models, and more recently, evolutionary dynamic models. These models have been used to understand a wide variety of user behaviors, from individuals interacting with social bookmark search in Delicious and MrTaggy.com to groups of people working on articles in Wikipedia. These models range in complexity from a simple set of assumptions to complex equations describing human and group behaviors.

By studying online social systems such as Google Plus, Twitter, Delicious, and Wikipedia, we further our understanding of how knowledge is constructed in a social context. In this talk, I will illustrate how a model-driven approach could help illuminate the path forward for research in social computing and community knowledge building.

We’ll be posting similar previews of the other two keynotes shortly.

Note: Dr. Chi replaces Bernardo Huberman in the closing keynote slot.

WikiViz 2011 visualization contest winner

Announcement, WikiSym 2011

In partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, we are pleased to announce the winners of WikiViz 2011, a visualization contest focused on exploring how Wikipedia, in concert with other open data sources, has made the world a better place. The contest solicited “the most effective, compelling, and creative data-driven visualizations of how Wikipedia impacted the world with its content, culture, and open collaboration model” (from the WMF’s announcement).

The winner is: Jen Lowe of Datatelling with “A Thousand Fibers Connect Us — Wikipedia’s Global Reach”. Click the title to explore the Jen’s visualization.

Congratulations to Jen! And thanks to our jury: Moritz Stefaner of Well Formed Data, Kim Rees of Periscopic, Andrew Vande Moere of KU Leuven and Information Aesthetics, Erick Zachte of WMF, and Gregorio Convertino of PARC.

Best Paper winners for WikiSym 2011

Announcement, WikiSym 2011

Just in time for the International Day of Being Awesome, we are pleased to announce the Best Paper awards for WikiSym 2011.

One long paper and one short paper have been selected on the basis of outstanding reviews and evaluation by our awards committee. By coincidence only, both papers address similar themes.

The Best Full Paper is:

WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance
Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Anuradha Uduwage, Zhenhua Dong, Shilad Sen, David R. Musicant, Loren Terveen, John Riedl

The Best Short Paper is:

Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing
Judd Antin, Raymond Yee, Coye Cheshire and Oded Nov

Congratulations to the winners! And thanks to our selection committee members: Kevin Crowston, Andreea Gorbatai, Amy Bruckman, and Nicolas Jullien.

WikiSym is seeking student volunteers

Announcement, WikiSym 2011

We are searching for enthusiastic students (undergraduate, graduate or PhD level) who want to help us running WikiSym 2011. We are celebrating our 7th edition on October 3-5, 2011 at the Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley (Mountain View, California).
Collaboration

The only mandatory requirement is that you must have had student status for the past academic year (2010-2011). All students, regardless of discipline, are encouraged to apply, and no previous experience is required. This opportunity is particularly well suited for Bay Area students

WikiSym volunteers commit to the following tasks:

  • Undertake between 5 and 10 hours of work during the conference days (October 3-5).
  • Collaborate with conference organizational team to set up and run on-site activities.
  • Attend a short guidance session in the afternoon before the conference (Sunday, October 2) , at the conference hotel (also in Mountain View).
  • Typical tasks will include: attend the registration desk, support to set up sessions, support for running the Open Space track and other similar duties.

No other technical or logistics support is forseen, since permanent staff from the conference venue (MSR) will undertake those tasks.

In exchange, students will get free access to the conference (including meals, reception and dinner) for the 3-days.

Applicants must send a short motivational letter by September 28 to chair__at__wikisym–dot–org, explaining why they have interest in participating as volunteers in WikiSym. On September 29 we will publish the list of selected volunteers. We have a limited number of volunteer slots, so please contact us early if you are interested.

Looking forward to meeting you at WikiSym!!

WikiSym 2011 social media analysis by EventBurn

Announcement, WikiSym 2011

We are pleased to announce social media analysis for WikiSym 2011 by EventBurn, a Minneapolis-based startup. To see a live summary of what folks have to say about WikiSym on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, browse to:

http://www.eventburn.com/wikisym2011

This dashboard will be available from immediately until a few weeks after the conference. (And, of course, only public postings are included in the analysis.)

As a reminder, please tag your photos and posts with “wikisym” in order to share them with the rest of the WikiSym community and ensure they’re included in the summary.

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!

WikiSym 2011 registration is now open

Announcement

We are pleased to announce that registration for WikiSym 2011 is now open. Follow this link to begin the easy Google Checkout-based process.

Early-bird registration ends August 29, so don’t delay. Even students will save money by registering early!

WikiViz 2011: Data Visualization Challenge

Announcement, Uncategorized, WikiSym 2011

Data visualization is an emerging field of interest in many areas such as journalism, consulting or research. The abundance of digital information, and specially open and publicly available datasets, is boosting inspiration of InfoViz practitioners and enthusiast to surprise us with creative and beautiful visualizations.

Eagle(owl)-eye - modified

In WikiSym, we have been planning the best way to promote and disseminate interest in this area, considering the advantages of open content, open datasets and open web technologies. Therefore, together with Wikimedia Foundation we decided to co-organized a challenge to ask data/information visualization experts, computational journalists, data artists and data scientists to create the most insightful visualization of open collaboration data. We will also have several partners from design, innovation, and media collaborating with us in this contest.

The rules, schedule and topic of this year’s challenge will be published very soon. A committee of recognized InfoViz experts will review all submissions to select a winner and 2 finalists, who will be able to attend WikiSym 2011 next October at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley to present their creations and receive their awards.

To learn more about this challenge, you can visit the WikiViz page on the WikiSym 2011 website, or follow us on Twitter.

CfP Doctoral Symposium WikiSym 2011

Announcement, General, WikiSym 2011

The CfP in the Doctoral Symposium of WikiSym 2011 has been published. You can check the details on the WikiSym 2011 website.

The call is open to doctoral students doing work related to open collaboration, regardless of their academic discipline. Relevant disciplines include (but are not limited to) computer science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, information science, cognitive science, rhetoric, communications, and economics. Applicants should have a clear research direction in their ongoing work to get utmost benefit from this session.

In addition, students with accepted submissions to this session will be eligible to receive some support for travel, accommondation and conference registration, thanks to a generous grant from NSF.

Georg Friedrich Kersting - Der elegante Leser

Creative Commons sponsors WikiSym 2011

Announcement, Sponsorship, WikiSym 2011

We are pleased to announce a new sponsor for WikiSym 2011, the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration.

Creative Commons will join us this year as a WikiSym “Associate” sponsor, focusing on Open Educational Resources and open content, both important topics of interest to our conference.

Creative Commons logo español
CC logo by claudioruiz, in Flickr

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco (California) that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation worldwide. Our partnership will help us disseminate our shared interests to a broader, global audience.

We are also preparing joint initiatives that we hope you will enjoy in our exciting march towards WikiSym 2011, October 3-5. We will announce these initiatives as we move along. Creative commons lends us their network to publish important news about WikiSym.

Make sure to keep an eye on this blog and our Twitter account (@wikisym) to hear about them first!

CosmoCode sponsors WikiSym 2011 website

Announcement, WikiSym 2011,

We are very happy to announce that CosmoCode is sponsoring the upcoming WikiSym 2011 website.

Thanks to this sponsorship, this year our website will run on the champion wiki platform DokuWiki. The CosmoCode wiki team is also working on a brand new design, exclusive for WikiSym.

We would like to thank Andreas Gohr and the CosmoCode wiki team for their great support and effort to make the WikiSym 2011 website an attractive experience for our community.