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.
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.
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!
Last but not least, the posters session will feature the 15 posters listed below, along with 8 more from the doctoral consortium selectees, with authors available and excited to chat with you about their work. See the schedule for details on when and where to go.
The demos session will feature four awesome demonstrations. See the schedule for details on when and where to go.
Ian Sullivan, James R. Garrison, Matthew Curinga
While most existing wiki systems are geared toward editing text documents, we have built Wikiotics to enable the collaborative creation of interactive multimedia materials most needed in language instruction. In our demonstration, we will show several types of interactive lessons that can be created from simple multimedia elements. We will also show the lesson creation/editing interfaces and how our smart phone app can simplify the process of capturing local media and integrating that new media into existing lessons.
Takashi Yamanoue, Kentaro Oda, Koichi Shimozono
Experimental implementation of SDK for Java Programs, PukiWiki-Java Connector, which makes an illusion that wiki pages as persistent data store, is shown. A Java program of them can be running on a wiki page and it can save its data on the page. The Java program consists of PukiWiki which is a popular wiki in Japan, the plug-in which starts up Java Applets. A Java Applet with default access privilege cannot store its data at the local host. We have constructed the API for the applets to ease data persistent at a remote host. We also combined the API and the wiki system by introducing a wiki plugin and tags for starting up Java Applets. Applet generated persistent data resides in wiki texts side by side. We have successfully ported useful programs such as a simple text editor, a simple music editor, a simple draw program and programming environments in a PukiWiki system using this connector.
Michael Dale
Collaborative video for Wikipedia faces several challenges from social and community adoption to technology limitations. This presentation explores how each of these problems are being addressed. The presentation focuses on building a collaborative educational video community and how the html5 technology platform has evolved to better support rich media applications such as HTML5 video editing in the browser and standardization around the royalty free WebM video format. Finally we propose a in-browser collaborative video sequencer to enable broad participation in video editing within Wikimedia projects.
Florian Matthes, Christian Neubert
Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a challenging task, modern enterprises have to face. This task is often addressed via heavy-weight and expensive EAM tools to collect, structure, visualize and analyze architectural information. A major problem in EAM is the mismatch between the existing unstructured information sources and the rigid information structures and collaboration mechanisms provided by today’s EAM tools.
To address this mismatch, researchers at Technische Universität München established in 2010 a community of experienced enterprise architects from 25 large German enterprises to pursue a different, wiki-based approach to EAM. The idea is to start with existing unstructured information sources captured as wiki pages (e.g., derived from Office documents) and then to incrementally and collaboratively enrich the wiki pages with attributes, types and integrity rules as needed for architecture modeling, visualization and analysis.
An off-the shelf commercial enterprise wiki (Tricia by infoAsset AG) provides the required incremental information structuring capabilities as so-called Hybrid Wikis. Customizable in-browser visualizations are provided by the System Cartography Tool developed at Technische Universität München.
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.
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.
The WikiSym 2011 Doctoral Symposium will be held as a pre-conference event on October 2nd, 2011 on the campus of Stanford University. Accepted PhD students have been invited to present their dissertation work and participate in discussions and feedback sessions with three faculty mentors:
Students will also present their work as a poster during the conference, to encourage more feedback and discussions with the WikiSym research community.
Doctoral students studying any aspect of open collaboration were invited to apply for a position in the symposium. Applications were reviewed by the panel of faculty mentors and accepted students received travel support and conference registration courtesy of the National Science Foundation.
Eight students were accepted to participate. Their names, affiliations, and research titles are as follows.