Category Archives: Announcement

Wikisym 2011: Call for participation

Announcement, WikiSym 2011

Hello. This is a formal version of the first call for contributions to WikiSym 2011. It will be also available on the 2011 website, as soon as our new wiki is ready (in short time).

WikiSym 2011 Call for Participation

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7th International Conference on Wikis and Open Collaboration
October 3-5, 2011 | Mountain View, California

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2011, WikiSym celebrates its 7th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Mountain View, California at the Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley.

Submissions are invited for the following categories:

  • Research Papers, Panels, Workshop: April 1
  • Posters, Demos: May 13
  • Notification of Acceptance: June 17

Continue reading Wikisym 2011: Call for participation →

WikiSym 2011 at MSR Silicon Valley

Announcement, WikiSym 2011

Hello all!

We are very pleased to share with you some exciting details about the next WikiSym.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

WikiSym 2011 will take place at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, (Mountain View, CA), on October 3-5, 2011. Microsoft itself has become our first premium sponsor for the next year.

WikiSym annually brings together  researchers, companies, entrepeneurs and practitioners working on open collaboration. We believe this balance between academia and industry is a powerful way to foster innovation and confront the exciting challenges in this field.

(c) Microsoft 2010

Open collaboration and its associated technologies have had a significant impact on our society at large: OER, social media, mass-media, business strategies, entertainment, personal and professional relationships, etc. For this reason, we are committed to gathering support from different sponsors, reflecting the growing interest on these topics from distinct angles. We intend to host interesting sessions for our industry audience that will also involve scholars and students.

Likewise, we plan to once again host a high quality academic program. We call for contributions covering  many different perspectives of open collaboration. The first Call for Papers will be circulated soon. All submissions will undergo a rigorous reviewing process led by our PC Chair Andrea Forte (Drexel University, Philadelphia). Accepted works will be presented at the conference and published in the ACM Digital Library, thanks to our agreement with ACM SIGWEB.

The deadline for full papers, panels and workshops is April 1, 2011. Submission due for posters and demos is May 13, 2011. The deadline for Doctoral Symposium submissions will be announced later on. Plan your submissions in advance!

We will publish further news and details very soon.

Stay tuned!

Felipe Ortega.
WikiSym 2011 General Chair.

WikiSym 2010 Proceedings Available

Announcement, Proceedings, WikiSym 2010

As you may know, at the same time WikiSym 2010 was taking place in the beautiful city of Gdańsk (Poland), last July, the WikiSym 2010 Proceedings were made available in the ACM Digital Library.

We want to encourage open access to research information, so like in prior years we have uploaded all papers and submissions presented at WikiSym 2010 to the WikiSym 2010 wiki. They are accessible on the Proceedings page, as a ZIP file with the whole collection. Alternatively, you can find and download any individual submission from the list.

We hope this effort will help to disseminate the valuable research contributions presented at WikiSym. At the same time,  we aim to leverage global awareness about the need to support the widespread circulation of research works and findings in Computer Science.

WikiSym Program Announced

Announcement, Wikimedia, WikiSym 2010

We announced the WikiSym program, please check it out!

Register for WikiSym 2010!

Announcement

WikiSym 2010 registration is open! Early (reduced rate) registration is available until May 30. To register:

  1. Create an account on the WikiSym 2010 wiki
  2. Fill out the form and indicate your registration category
  3. Pay via Google Checkout

If you already have a wiki account from last year, you can reuse it—just log in and edit your profile (link on the top menu) to indicate if you are attending 2010’s symposium.

There are also accommodation details listed on the wiki—a limited number of on-site rooms are available.

WikiSym 2010: Where great minds collide!

Announcement, Wikimedia, WikiSym 2010

Now in its sixth year, WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, reliably draws together many of the diverse crowds that comprise the Wiki ecosystem. Its location alternates between North America and Europe; this year’s WikiSym is in the Polish city of Gdańsk, situated on the southern edge of the Baltic Sea.

WikiSym is the only international conference that focuses exclusively on wikis and open collaboration. WikiSym’s core audience has always been academics, but the Symposium’s reach extends to all groups using and interested in wikis, including consulting firms, corporate managers responsible for deployments, and not-for-profits. Presentations at WikiSym include research into community dynamics of wikis and online collaborative projects, demos  of wiki technologies, in-depth workshops, and discussions about the future of wikis. WikiSym is very inclusive and vendor-neutral, and has become an fertile venue for insight and opportunity:

  • Academics share their research and prototypes;
  • Different wiki platforms openly share customer issues, plans, techniques and technologies;
  • Plugin developers share with academics their experiences of taking an idea to market;
  • Practitioners explain real-life challenges of getting adoption in their organizations;
  • Consultants help managers responsible for deployments learn how to seed adoption and frame requests for assistance;
  • Students finishing up their PhDs learn from consultants how to provide consulting services;
  • Friendships, business relationships and alliances form across the ecosystem.

For me, the hallmarks of a good conference are the insights I take away, great networking contacts, and knowing relevant next steps on which I can take immediate action. In WikiSym’s Open Space sessions, participants are systematically encouraged to reflect on and distill their conference hallway conversations, this brings partial ideas to fruition.

The WikiSym community is a major draw in itself. We are a friendly, intelligent crowd who often only sees each other at the annual WikiSyms, even though some of us continuously collaborate online on specific projects. Many open-source projects use WikiSym as a natural venue to bring together their teams.

WikiSym is an ACM-sponsored conference and has frequently co-located with OOPSLA (the Object Oriented Computing Science Research conference). This year, however, we partner with Wikimania, the International Conference of the Wikimedia Foundation, which attracts Wikimedia and Wikipedia contributors and leaders from around the world. So, if you’ve ever thought about going to either conference, here’s your chance to go to both!

WikiSym runs July 7-9, and Wikimania is July 9-11th. Visit http://wikisym.org/ws2010 for more information.

Save the Date: WikiSym 2010

Announcement, WikiSym 2010

I am pleased to announce that WikiSym 2010: The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration will be held July 7, 8 and 9, 2010 in Gdańsk, Poland. The conference will be co-located with Wikimania 2010, the sixth annual Wikimedia Foundation conference, which will be held on July 9, 10, and 11 in Gdańsk.

Important dates:

  • March 7 — deadline for research paper submissions
  • March 21 — deadline for demonstration, poster, panel and workshop submissions
  • July 7,8,9 — WikiSym

WikiSym welcomes papers about any aspect of wikis, and we are also interested in research that investigates open collaboration projects and software. Now in its sixth year, WikiSym aims to continue presenting high-quality research into wiki software and processes, while also widening its scope to include research into how open collaboration works. WikiSym also provides a unique venue for wiki practitioners to meet and network along with wiki researchers. And this year, WikiSym will be just before Wikimania, which is a community conference for contributors and community members of the Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia). Wikimania provides an intensive, international venue for discussing the hands-on aspects of how the world’s largest wikis work, and is hosted this year by members of the Polish Wikimedia community.

The symposium chair for WikiSym 2010 is Phoebe Ayers (UC Davis); the Program Chair is Felipe Ortega (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain).

Our formal Call for Papers and more information about the venue, registration etc. will be released soon. Stay tuned!

WikiSym 2009 Concluded Successfully

Announcement, Proceedings, WikiSym 2009

WikiSym 2009 concluded successfully today after three days full of research and experience reports, workshops and tutorials, invited talks and keynotes, and, of course, open space.

The proceedings as one record of the conference are available on the event wiki as well as the ACM Digital Library. To that official record, the WikiSym 2009 event wiki adds much more information. There you can find workshop results, open space notes, general commentary, and more. In addition, Martin Cleaver has been streaming on ustream.tv.

A WikiSym first was the best research paper award. It went to paper 104, “rv you’re dumb: Identifying Discarded Work in Wiki Article History” by Michael D. Ekstrand, and John T. Riedl (University of Minnesota) (USA).

The organizing committee would like to thank everyone who helped, which includes the participants. That’s because in the wiki world it is all of us who make an event successful, and not any particular person. If you think this is a funny statement, please come and join us at WikiSym 2010, which we will provide more information about shortly.

WikiSym Monday Morning Announcements

Announcement, WikiSym 2009

A couple of announcements for Monday and Tuesday of WikiSym 2009!

  • Open space starts 10:15am for 15min to open the day
  • Open space continues through Tuesday all day!
  • Please come Tuesday evening to open space to close the conference!
  • If you haven’t picked up your T-shirt, please do so today over lunch in open space
  • Please consider meeting a Disney social software expert on Wednesday after WikiSym!

For meeting Disney, please talk to Felipe Ortega for more information. Thanks to Camille Rose for making this happen!

WikiSym Sunday Evening Meeting Point

Announcement, WikiSym 2009

Here is one option to meet for dinner and hang out with other WikiSym folks: We will meet at the entrance steps to Cirque du Soleil in Downtown Disney tonight, Sunday, at 7pm. Buses from the hotel leave about every 20min so at the bus stop, make some WikiSym noises! Once we meet at the meeting point, we’ll be waiting for about 10-15min while figuring out where to go. The final destination, e.g. a restaurant, will be tweeted using the #wikisym hashtag so watch that channel! (And stay near someone with a working U.S. cell phone to catch the information if you didn’t make it to the meeting place in time.)