The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (2005-2022)

OpenSym News

  • WikiSym 2009 Registration Opens!

    The registration for WikiSym 2009 is open! Please register first on the wiki and then for the (physical) event, if you want to attend in person.

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    The event registration is handled by the OOPSLA registration system. If you are only interested in WikiSym, you can shorten the event registration: Once on page 4 in the process, jump forward to page 14 to checkout.

    We have previously published the participation fee schedule. Please note that early (reduced fee) registration ends September 17!

    Thanks, and see you in Orlando!

  • WikiSym 2009 Keynote: Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site

    WikiSym 2009, Closing Keynote, Tuesday October 27, 2009

    Speaker: Brion Vibber (CTO, Wikimedia Foundation)

    Abstract: Collaborative communities such as those building wikis and open source software often discover that their human interactions have just as many scaling problems as their web infrastructure. As the number of people involved in a project grows, key decision-makers often become bottlenecks, and community structure needs to change or a project can become stalled despite the best intentions of all participants. I’ll describe some of the community scaling challenges in both Wikipedia’s editor community and the development of its underlying MediaWiki software and how we’ve overcome — or are still working to overcome — decision-making bottlenecks to “maximize community throughput”.

    Speaker bio: Currently CTO and Senior Software Architect for the Wikimedia Foundation, Brion Vibber has spent his career since 2002 growing up with Wikipedia’s community and software development. He lives in San Francisco in his native California, but still misses the Florida sunsets from his time at Wikimedia’s original offices in St Petersburg.

    More information

    You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

  • WikiSym 2009 Keynote: Visualizing the Inner Lives of Texts

    WikiSym 2009, Opening Keynote, Sunday October 25, 2009

    Speakers: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, IBM Research

    Abstract: Visualization is often viewed as a way to unlock the secrets of numeric data. But what about political speeches, novels, and blogs? These texts hold at least as many surprises. On the Many Eyes site, a place for collective visualization, we have seen an increasing appetite for analyzing documents. We present a series of techniques for visualizing and analyzing unstructured text. We also discuss how a technique developed for visualizing the authoring patterns of Wikipedia articles has recently revealed the collective lives of a much broader class of documents.

    Speaker bios: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are research scientists in IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. Viégas is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg’s visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. Both Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the “history flow” project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the power of web-based visualization and the social forms of data analysis it enables.

    More information

    You can also find the title/speaker/abstract information on the WikiSym 2009 event wiki in the WikiSym 2009 Proceedings pages. You can even comment on the talk’s dedicated wiki page! To comment, you need to register first, however.

  • WikiSym 2009 Speaker Lineup

    WikiSym 2009 is shaping up nicely; we’ll soon be providing a first glimpse at the program. For now, here are the confirmed speakers, more to follow:

    We are very excited to have these speakers present at WikiSym 2009!

  • WikiSym 2009 Participation Fees

    We are very happy with the interest in WikiSym 2009 and all the early travel planning. Here is the 2009 participation fee schedule. Registration will open in July, cut-off date for early registration is September 17, 2009.

    Registrant type Participation fee
    Early registrant $560
    Early registrant, ACM member

    		 $490
    Regular registrant $650
    Regular registrant, ACM member $590
    Student

    		 $275
    Student, ACM member

    		 $255
    One day only $275

  • Paper Notification Deadline and Late Submissions

    We pushed back the paper submission deadline in March/April by a week and hence we will be taking a week longer with the paper decisions.

    Please expect the notification email on or around May 29th now.

    On a related note, we are still receiving late submissions for posters, demos, etc.

    WikiSym’s open community nature will allow you to present demos and posters in open space.

    Submissions that were put in by the deadline and that have been accepted will be made available (and archived) in the ACM Digital Library as part of the WikiSym conference proceedings series. If all you care about is showing your work, by all means, please come by and don’t worry about submission deadlines! (If you have special requirements, please contact the (general chair, though.)

  • WikiSym 2009 Second Deadline: April 24th, 2009

    Only two more weeks until the second WikiSym 2009 deadline! By April 24th, 2009, submissions for posters, demonstrations, WikiFest and Doctoral Symposium proposals are due! Please see the call for papers for more information!

  • WikiSym 2009 First Deadline: April 2nd, 2009

    Due to multiple requests, we have pushed back the first deadline for WikiSym 2009 submissions (research papers, experience reports, workshop proposals) by six days from March 27th to April 2nd. We hope that this will allow everyone to better cope with multiple competing requests. For the WikiSym 2009 Call for Papers please see the wiki.

  • Name Change: Wikis and Open Collaboration

    Web-based readers of this blog may have noticed a new extended title of the WikiSym site: We are now “the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration.” This is to better express the breadth of work requested for and displayed on the WikiSym website, at the actual event, and in the proceedings.

    WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, is broadly about open collaboration as exemplified by wikis, but not only by wikis. At WikiSym you can find the best of research and practice on processes, politics, philosophy, etc. of wiki-style collaboration, be it on blogs, wikis, and other social software. Despite the shorthand “WikiSym” this symposium is not narrowly about wiki technology.

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  • WikiSym 2009!

    This Wednesday 25th Feb marks just 8 months till WikiSym 2009. Planning is underway!

    Florida! Disney!

    We alternate the conference between being located in Europe and the Americas. This year we’re in fabulous Florida, Orlando to be exact, and right next to Disney World. Co-located with OOPSLA, with WikiSym starting Sunday 25th Oct 2009, and running till Tuesday; OOPSLA spans Weds to Friday.  While our membership bases have become very different (OOPSLA is purely a technology conference, but WikiSym’s growth means it constitutes typically only 1/3 technologists), our organizations’ history means we have become good at supporting one other.

    Our Conference is evolving

    Back in 2005 WikiSym was principally a technology conference: open source enthusiasts and company representatives discussing the technology paradigm. As the years have marched on, Wiki technology has proven itself as a cornerstone tool of Social Media because it radically changes the way society interacts. Stemming from the simplest change of easing the process of constructing interlinked documentation, Wikis facilitate a quick and easy way to document and continually refine, bringing an intranet to life with relevant and far-reaching information that addresses the “long tail of interests” of everyone who reads it.

    Companies enthuse at the idea of having “a company centric Wikipedia” and, if they get the culture working, gain real knowledge retention benefits once transparency hits: processes once treated as separate domains are recognised as not just having knock-on effects but living, complex and evolving interdependancies. And once this happens, the wiki is no longer solely a technology, but a paradigmatic mechanism that enables the capture and synthesis of leading edge thought, driving company evolution, and transforming company and industry boundaries.

    The very term “Wiki” has shifted from a particular type of technology to a prefix that implicates paradigm of openness, as witnessed by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams runaway hit, Wikinomics, a book now translated into more than 20 languages. WikiSym ’08 reminded the Gen Y participants that much of the content representation benefits we attribute to Wikis have been in SGML Hypertext for more than 20 years; wikis bring these benefits to the masses.

    It’s a natural step to pair Wiki style  freeform collaboration with data from the backend systems in the  enterprise layering insight and rapid change with hard evidence. We saw tremendous innovations in such integrations, for example, workflowing humans to review machine-translated wiki content.

    Diversity is our strength

    The growth in diversity of the community at WikiSym continues to thrill me more and more each year.

    WikiSym ’07 and ’08 continued to attract an ever broader diversity of audiences. From company decision makers seeking to understand how their businesses can be transformed using a wiki, researchers seeking collaboration opportunities, and wiki vendors keen to team up with their customers to demonstrate and explore the value: people at WikiSym 2008 confirmed to me that it was an amazing event to attend. Many of you will remember the video interviews I conducted: I’ll have something exciting to announce shortly about those interviews!

    As the momentum grows, 2009 promises to be an even more incredible year for those of us in the industry.

    Planning for 2009

    Right now, the organizing committee is in the throes of planning. The Calls For Papers for 2009 is presently active: there is still time for you to create a paper for formal presentation. We are presently establishing Keynote speakers, session leaders, and all those tracks that need a team to prepare.

    Are you in Florida? Do you live in or know Orlando well?

    2008’s operations went so smoothly because the efforts of the University of Porto students and the coordination of Ademar and his team. Having local knowledge and an engaged local staff makes a world of difference, so we’re reaching out to universities, institutions, local companies and individuals willing and able to lend a hand with logistics. They ensure  loose ends are planned for and any issues addresses. So, if you are near to Orlando, we want to hear from you! Please, send us specific ideas about venues for events, hotels, wiki walks, or help us identify people who might be willing to help.

    Best regards,

    Martin Cleaver, publicity co-chair.

    Head Blender, Blended Perspectives
    Toronto, Canada