Wiki Sym Two Thousand Five

Introduction

People running sessions at this conference were experimenting with variations from 'traditional' conference processes - mainly to get participants more involved, and moving on the things that matter to all of us. Wiki people experiment with different features on our wikis all the time, so it's unsurprising that there's interest in experimenting in off-line process as well. This attitude is one of the reasons that wiki software, culture, and the network/community of people around it is the most hopeful phenomenon i know of in the technology world. I'll be looking for opportunities to engage and contribute more ProcessArts perspective at RecentChangesCamp.

Future events: WikiSym 2005 was so good there will be another WikiSym - http://ws2005.wikisym.org/space/WikiSym+2006 - and it spawned another event, RecentChangesCamp - an OpenSpace on wikis, February 2006. I'll be there, and maybe WikiSymTwoThousandSix? as well.

A few of us got there and back WikiVanning (photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnabbe/56241736/ ), passing the hours choosing from our growing list of topics (wiki-related and not) to discuss for a few minutes or hours. We thought of it as a one-room OpenSpace. Several of us are OpenSpace advocates, and we talked on the way down about how to bring an Open Space feel to the conference. I was impressed (but not surprised) at how open the conference organizers were to the idea, just another example of the ProcessArts-friendliness of wiki folk.

Meeting so many people in the flesh, after years of interacting with them only in the text, was a novel homecoming. Countless interesting intersections of people, groups and ideas occurred. The data exchange and relationship-building that i saw and participated in was intense.

Among the many things I found myself talking with people about were VennInterface and more generally WikiWeblogPim, and on the less geeky side, OpenSpace and NonviolentCommunication and ProcessArts in general. What i most wish i had talked more about was the ExtremeTaoOfDemocracy? project. On the up-side, inspired by others' interest in and work on SisterSites, i started some low-key advocacy (see MeatballWiki:SisterSitesImplementationGuide and MeatballWiki:WikiEnginesWithSisterSites ). I intend to put more time into in January, after my upcoming trip to SouthAsia?.

Who was there

• From Meatball: MeatballWiki:WikiSymWhosGoing
• On the WikiSym wiki - http://ws2005.wikisym.org/space/CategoryHomePage
• (is there a complete list anywhere?)

Session reports

Multiple sessions went on at the same time, so of course i only participated in some of the programs, and there's only a few notes here about others. The full program: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2005/program.html

Day One

WikiSpam? - Knowledge was shared, coordination moved forward on SharedAntiSpam? - a system to share blacklists (of spam URLs). PeterKaminski? and EugeneEricKim? wrote Eaton to allow sites to filter out posts with links from any given blacklist. Overheard during coding: "eekim.com is now on the black-list!"

Alas, no one came to my proposed session on trouble-shooting individual wikis' spam problems. The conference did however help motivate me to scrrub the spam off AbbeNormal here, and i look forward to implementing the above-mentioned system.

Day Two

WardCunningham's talk - He gets a lot of e-mail from people about what wiki has meant to them. "I like that life-changing thing." Then he made a distinction between people exchanging with others (collaboration) and people giving, just to help each other out (cooperation). He also showed us his latest wiki edit log analysis tools (with Tufte-ian graphics), very helpful for spotting and removing spam. He even has a posse (er, um, stewards) who keep an eye on things.

Future of Wikis -

• MeatballWiki:WikiSymFutureOfWikis
• http://meatballsociety.org/cgi-bin/future
• I can't really add to those notes, other than to say that this is one example of the kind of process experimentation i wrote about above - Sunir was trying to shift this from a panel to a more participatory format that would actually lead to people working together on things. He didn't get what he wanted, but he tried something new and hopefully it gets better next time.

Right next to us was the WikiStandards? group, which got some good group-forming happening, and started a mailing list http://wikisym.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wiki-standards and settled on the WikiSym wiki as a good neutral place to do standards development - http://ws2005.wikisym.org/space/Wiki+Standards

Day Three

InterWiki workshop - We got everyone possible on one of the SynchronousEditors (in this case Gobby, so no Macs alas). Nine computers were editing the same document. After making a long list of InterWiki topics, we narrowed it down and split up to take on a few. See the http://ws2005.wikisym.org/space/InterWiki+Gobby+Session

SisterSites - EugeneEricKim? is shepherding a spec for sites to give their page index in a way that makes SisterSites easy. (WikiVanning home up I-5, we outlined a draft of the Meatball:SisterSitesImplementationGuide . Also see Meatball:AllPagesStandard )

Other sessions included people from different wiki indexing efforts, and the social perspective on wiki (this group started Meatball:WikiPractices )

Others' reports, pictures; miscellany

http://ws2005.wikisym.org/space/Reports+about+WikiSym+2005

I heard about http://www.wikiwyg.net/ which is FreeOpenSoftware that lets users add styling to text in textboxes by clicking on buttons rather than remembering arcane markup.

--JohnAbbe

SisterSites - Meatball:WikiSymTwoThousandFive