Here some notes from Wikimania 2011.
Dario
This was my first Wikimania and it was a tremendously enriching experience. I met a lot of
passionate Wikipedians and friends and finally got to meet face to face with some RCom
members I had only spoken to via skype or IRC. The organizers did an excellent job and the
social events have been some of the best I've seen at a conference. Last but not
least, having a female Wikipedian, amazing storyteller and PhD candidate in comparative
history of religions as a guide on the Sunday tour to Jerusalem was possibly the best
tribute to the resources we have in our community.
Here are some highlights from the conference:
[edit]Strategy and product development
I spoke to several people about how we make decisions on new features or large-scale
experiments at WMF and on the need for the community to trust us while we run these
experiments. This was also, incidentally, a point explicitly made by Jimbo in his closing
remarks and it was really good to hear him mention this. I heard people frustrated by not
being adequately listened to for their contribution to the product development or
strategic planning. We should find better ways to listen to our community without
necessarily making our product development an unmanageable form of radical participatory
design. We should tap into the strategy wiki as a repository of ideas and try to better
connect them to our current agenda. We should allow people to experiment more without
relying on WMF to do so (see below for some ideas on how to make this happen). The
strategy planning is over and we currently don't have a solution to harness the
creative and intellectual potential of our community on an ongoing basis: that's
another source of concern. Apart from this, one of the big takeaways from the conference
was the fact that I think we managed to persuade our community that experimenting with new
forms of social engagement does not mean turning Wikimedia into Facebook and I was glad to
see a broad support to our work from different parties (editors, chapter members, board
members).
[edit]Wikipedia as a platform/decentralizing innovation
Diederik, Ryan Lane and myself hosted a panel on how to open up Wikipedia's data by
allowing third parties to not only reuse our contents but also to build real applications
on top of these data. We gave a short presentation of what a relatively modest allocation
of effort to support OpenID and OAuth could produce in terms of positively disruptive
experimentation and decentralized innovation. This would allow WMF to focus on core
projects and anybody else to develop new applications for our community and to explore
collaborative models that are relevant to our mission but we currently cannot support
because of limited internal resources. On my way back from Wikimania I discussed these
ideas with many WMF people to find out that there would be some large internal support for
this if we put together a proposal: that's currently in the pipeline.
[edit]Expert participation
I presented the early results from the expert participation survey (a collaboration with
Daniel Mietchen, Giota Alevizou and some external researchers in Germany and the UK) and I
got a lot of valuable feedback in 1:1 conversations after the talk. People involved in the
higher education program were particularly excited at finding ways to engage with
researchers and academics, outside of the classroom. Cheryl Moi, one of the campus
ambassadors for the education program, was recently contacted by people at the National
Academy of Science and we are now considering whether we should start a program similar to
the Wikipedian in Residence initiative to increase the integration between scientific
institutions and Wikimedia (expanding on Daniel'sWiR model).
[edit]Source-centric collaboration
I had 1:1 discussions on collaboration centered on sources with a bunch of people
(including Andrew Lih, Benjamin Mako Hill, Heather Ford and Achal Prabhala). I am putting
together some ideas partly based on these conversations and partly based on existing
projects, on how to better support the selection, evaluation and discussion of sources
that are cited in Wikipedia articles.
[edit]Research outreach
I participated in Daniel's presentation on open access/open data and participated in a
panel moderated by folks from Wikimedia Germany about EU-funded research consortia and
Wikimedia'sparticipation in research projects. It was great to hear that chapters are
starting to join research consortia as partners and we discussed the barriers they are
currently facing when they are approached by research groups. I gave an overview of what
the Foundation (and RCom in particular) is doing to strengthen ties with the academic
community (via the Research Index, the open data project, the Research Newsletter, the
research fellowships etc). My feeling is that these initiatives were really well received
but we should put more effort into disseminating them.
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