From Heather Ford‘s excellent blog on Ethnography (and other matters), comes this quote:
In the closing session last year, I remember saying “I have been to a lot of conferences lately and I don’t feel like I belong. But I feel like I belong here.” People come to WikiSym because it’s the place to be if you’re doing Wikipedia work. In the words of conference chair, Cliff Lampe said, “WikiSym is the place we come where we know we don’t have to explain ourselves. Where people just “get it”.
Wikisym 2012 starts tomorrow, and it looks to be a great program. Later, I’ll thank all of the volunteers who have poured their hearts into this conference, but I want to take a moment to thank the great sponsors we have for this meeting as well.
Ars Electronica Center (http://www.aec.at/) has provided a very welcoming, engaging, and inspiring home for us this week. With the able help of Stefan Pewan and Laura Kepplinger, they have let us hang out on the shores of the Danube on the cusp of the Ars Electronica festival. Watching little kids put together radio controlled paper letter signs (hard to explain) has been fun.
The Wikimedia Foundation (http://wikimediafoundation.org/) has been a great supporter, allowing us to bring in some excellent keynote speakers and keep the cost of the conference low for attendees. This enables a group of great young researchers, who are asking the questions important for the future sustainability of open collaboration, to participate and discuss with one another their findings.
The U.S. National Science Foundation (http://nsf.gov) has provided generous support for many of the doctoral students who attended the Sunday Doctoral Consortium to travel to that meeting, and attend the conference. The DC was a fantastic day of young scholars sharing their work and receiving feedback from professors at different universities. Specifically, this funding was made available by the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate.
Finally, Google has provided generous support to enable us to provide some refreshments, and host the reception. This funding was initiated by their group who supports open source projects of all types, and they are moral supporters of the mission of Wikisym as well as financial supporters.
Thanks to these folks, we’ll be able to put on a fantastic program this year, and leave future Wikisyms in a good state. We appreciate this support, and it goes to show how many people it takes to make an event like this a success.
I can’t believe it’s already on us, but Wikisym 2012 starts in Linz Austria next week. This year, we have an exciting program. On Tuesday, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is speaking to our group as our opening keynote speaker. This is a great opportunity to engage in the project’s most vocal advocate and think about how our research can help the sustainability of open collaboration into the future.
We also have a diverse program of content. Like always, we’ll be doing Open Spaces, which allows people to host incredible discussions and have ad hoc meetings of the mind about topics that interest us all. Dozens of authors and reviewers, and our awesome Technical Chair Dan Cosley, have created a rich and exciting technical program.
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2012/bin/view/Main/Schedule
I start my travel soon, so I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in beautiful Linz to discuss some exciting research and practice around open collaboration.
If you registered during July 11 and July 27 and you also received an email that your registration was cancelled, you ran into a WikiSym / Google Checkout glitch that we just discovered. The cancellation is correct and you will have to register again using WikiSym 2012 Registration.
We believe that only a small number of registrations are affected. Still, it is annoying, and we apologize for any inconveniences this may cause!
Early registration has been extended until August 6.