The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (2005-2022)

OpenSym News

  • Definition of Open Collaboration

    Many years after we started to use the term open collaboration and after some discussion between the WikiSym steering committee members, here is our definition of “open collaboration”. It provides the umbrella motivation for WikiSym + OpenSym.

    Open collaboration is collaboration that is

    • egalitarian (everyone can join, no principled or artificial barriers to participation exist),
    • meritocratic (decisions and status are merit-based rather than imposed) and
    • self-organizing (processes adapt to people rather than people adapt to pre-defined processes).

    Prime places to find open collaboration are on wikis, on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects, in open source, in open data and open government initiatives, open innovation, citizen engineering, peer production, and so on.

  • Announcing WikiSym + OpenSym 2013: Hong Kong, China, on Aug 5-7, 2013

    We are happy to announce that WikiSym 2013 will take place in Hong Kong on Aug 5-7, 2013. WikiSym will co-locate with a new sister event, OpenSym 2013. (WikiSym will be followed by Wikimania 2013, also in Hong Kong.) Research paper submission deadlines for WikiSym + OpenSym will be in March 2013. WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 will emphasize the open collaboration aspect of WikiSym both for researchers as well as practitioners. Open space will play an important role. More details to follow, stay tuned!

  • WikiSym 2012 Testimonials

    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”.

    (more…)

  • 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.

  • Wikisym 2012 ready to go in one week!

    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.

  • Wikisym 2012 Sneak Peeks!

    It’s hard to believe we’re just weeks away from Wikisym 2012. In the next few days, I wanted to highlight some content at the conference we’re very excited about. Today, I’m highlighting our closing keynote speaker, Brent Hecht.

    Brent is a PhD candidate at Northwestern, and will be starting at the University of Minnesota this coming year. He’s giving a very thoughtful talk on the ways to mine and encourage diversity in user generated content communities. From his abstract:

    “It is well known – especially to WikiSym attendees – that Wikipedia articles and other forms of user-generated content (UGC) play a significant role in the everyday lives of average Web users. Outside the public eye, however, UGC has become equally indispensable as a source of world knowledge for vital systems and algorithms in numerous areas of computer science. In this talk, I will demonstrate that UGC reflects the cultural diversity of its contributors to a previously unidentified extent and that this diversity has important implications for millions of Web users and many existing UGC-based technologies. Focusing on Wikipedia, I will show how UGC diversity can be extracted and measured using diversity mining algorithms and techniques from geographic information science. Finally, through two novel applications – Omnipedia and Atlasify – I will highlight the exciting potential for a new class of technologies enabled by the ability to harvest diverse perspectives from UGC.”

    Brent’s an engaging speaker, who has wowed crowds at CHI. We’re looking forward to his participation in the coming conference.

  • WikiSym 2012 Registration Glitch

    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.

  • WikiSym 2012 – Call for Participation

    Hello. This is a formal version of the first call for contributions to WikiSym 2012. It will be also available on the 2012 website, as soon as our new wiki is ready (in short time).

    WikiSym 2012 Call for Participation

    ———

    8th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

    August 27-29, 2012 | Linz, Austria

    The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2012, WikiSym celebrates its 8th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Linz, Austria.  We are excited this year to be collocated with Ars Electronica, the premier digital art and science meeting that attracts over 35,000 attendees per year.

    Submissions are invited for the following categories:

    April 13, 2012 [1] Research Papers, Panels, Workshops and Experience Reports
    April 27, 2012 [1] Doctoral Symposium
    May 30, 2012 Notification of Acceptance for Research Papers, Panels, Workshops and Experience reports
    June 13, 2012 Posters and Demos due
    June 25, 2012 Posters and Demos announced

    [1] As determined at the International Date Line. In other words, as long as it’s still April 13th or April 27 somewhere on Earth, the system will accept your submissions.

    See the call for participation for more details on submission requirements, templates, and mechanisms.

     

  • ACM’s Copyright Policy

    WikiSym archives its proceedings in the ACM Digital Library (as well as on our own servers). The use of the ACM DL is due to our roots in computer science, even though the scope has been extending significantly since the original WikiSym in 2005. The ACM recently published an explanation of its Copyright Policy that explains the extensive set of rights retained by authors who sign the ACM copyright transfer form, which is a precondition for publishing in the ACM Digital Library. These rights include the option to reuse your own work in future papers, to publish your work for non-commercial reasons, and more. A new initiative of the ACM lets authors use the ACM servers for retrieving a paper copy for free. You can read the article’s text online.

  • Ted Ernst on Open Space

    One of the traditions of WikiSym is “Open Space”. Our facilitator this year is Ted Ernst, a long-time member of the WikiSym community. Starting in 2005 as an attendee, Ted has subsequently served as an Open Space facilitator or co-facilitator in 2006, 2007, and 2008.

    What does Ted do when he’s not at WikiSym? “You know how executives sometimes find that the business isn’t growing as fast as they want it to and they end up spending more and more time at work? What I do is coach executive teams on habits that both reliably grow and drastically reduce the amount of time required to manage the business.”

    The following are some questions about Open Space and Ted’s answers.

    Can you summarize the basic structure and philosophy of Open Space?

    Open Space unleashes all the energy of a good coffee break, while providing enough structure to ensure that the right players are in each of those conversations.

    What should participants expect when they arrive in Open Space?

    Open Space is the self-organization we see in wiki, in real space. Expect to see a blank agenda wall to be filled up with topics convened by those present. Every topic people care about enough to convene a session on will get discussed/worked on by the others interested in that topic.

    How does Open Space differ from the “birds of a feather” or “special interest group” gatherings common at other conferences?

    Birds of a feather are great gatherings for these interest groups that are known in advance. Open space is best for those groups that haven’t been thought of before, or have never been convened. No one knows in advance which thoughts/topics/projects/ideas/etc. will have people excited on the day of the event, and Open Space allows us to roll with the energy we have in the moment.

    How has Open Space changed in the time you’ve been facilitating?

    Open Space is a minimal structure that allows self-organizing to happen and thus hasn’t changed in the time I’ve been facilitating. The growing edge for facilitators worldwide is looking for one more thing not to do. Everything that remains has withstood the test of time. Nothing significant has been added in 15-20 years.

    What has surprised you most about being an Open Space facilitator?

    It always works. No matter the looks on people’s faces, or how long it takes for the first session to be posted, every group I’ve ever experienced in Open Space does fill the wall with topics and great conversations happen.

    What is your most striking memory from Open Space sessions?

    At WikiSym 2008 in Porto, Portugal, Dan Ingalls from Sun Microsystems gave an invited talk on the Lively Kernel. Afterwards, he posted an Open Space topic to go deeper with anyone. He sat at a table one on one with a single WikiSym participant for 90 minutes. What a great opportunity for this “famous” person to spend that kind of time informally with someone truly interested (as opposed to all of the polite listening that can happen in an auditorium-type setting when that’s the only option), and what an opportunity for this one participant whose excitement was sparked by Dan’s talk!

    Anything else you’d like to share?

    Be prepared to be surprised!