[Wikimediaau-l] SFD, ACEC, LCA

[Brianna Laugher]

Hi all,

Some recent stuff:

1- Software Freedom Day. I went to the Melbourne event.
<http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/141/melbournes-software-freedom-day>
I gave a short talk about Wikimedia and its relation to free software
(ie via two ways - use/development of it, and inspiration from
ideals).

The venue it was held at, "The Hub @ Docklands", is a really great
venue. A short walk from Southern Cross station. A decent size, a
modern building filled with light and a good kitchen. CHEAP!
Apparently SFD's hosting was $88 for the day. If(when) we ever hold
anything event-like in Melbourne I would really consider this place.
There is a great open space
(<http://flickr.com/photos/pfctdayelise/2878089237/>) and a good room
for holding structured talks.

I also had some great discussion with Kathy Reid and Ben Balbo, who
are connected to Melb BarCamp and the Melb PHP group. I mentioned how
we might like to encourage MediaWiki development, and Ben encouraged
me to give a talk on MediaWiki at one of their PHP meetings. I am a
bit hesitant about this because all the PHP I've ever learned is only
because of MediaWiki, and I really know jack about squat, but if it is
just an intro thing it might be a good learning experience for me too.

And then we were talking about the BarCamp (I think it will be
March-ish) and Ben said he wanted to have some project hacking as part
of the event (they want it to be a weekend-long thing), and said the
project they work on could be some MediaWiki extension. I was pretty
blown away by this generous and immediate offer of support. To be fair
to people who know other languages I suggested another cool thing
might be to get people to work on using the MediaWiki API to do
interesting things, as I feel it is a deeply under-utilised API,
considering the richness of data in Wikimedia (and the free
licenses!). There is MediaWiki API support code for a number of
languages so you don't have to know PHP to use it which is nice.
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Client_Code>

So I will keep in touch with Ben and see if we can get some Melbourne
hackers exposed to/interested in MediaWiki code one way or another.

SFD was also interesting because even though it wasn't super-well
attended by the general public, I think it was actually useful for
supporting the existing people in the community just as a kind of
"getting back to ideals" thing, remembering why you're there and why
you care about the topic. I have found the free software community in
Australia to be very supportive and encouraging. We would do well to
emulate them. :)

2- Australian Computers in Education Conference. This is a conference
held every two years in a different city each time. It's pretty huge,
and really quite professional. I gave a talk about Wikipedia in
schools. I covered Wikipedia basics (ie encyclopedia, website, not for
profit, multilingual, wiki/community, and free content), some tools
for analysing article histories, what different types of projects
might be relevant, and finally the inclusion of Wikipedia in the HSC
English (NSW) curriculum. There's links and slides (and some audio I
recorded after I got back!) all on here:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pfctdayelise/Safe_wiki>

I will give a presentation at VITTA (Victorian IT Teachers Assoc) in
late November basically on the same topic, except (1) it will be
hands-on, in a computer lab - woot! and (2) I won't need to talk about
the HSC. So I would really appreciate it if anyone has a listen/look
at the stuff and if you think I missed something worth mentioning
please bring it up.

Back to ACEC, my talk was not super well attended, but with 14
simultaneous streams I was not too concerned!

I had two questions afterwards - one was from a teacher whose school
had an article. She said sometimes the article was vandalised but
before she could fix it it would already have been fixed, and she
wanted to know who those people were. (I talked about RC patrol.)
Another was from a teacher who asked what to do for grades 3-6 kids
who use Wikipedia unquestioningly. For students this age it is a bit
harder to know what to do, because they're probably a bit young to do
the whole critical thinking thing. I didn't have any good ideas. Does
anyone?

Later I also had a NZ teacher come up and say she got lots of good
info from my talk, which was very gratifying! She asked how she could
make contact with Wikipedians in NZ and I showed her WP:NZWPNB (an
extrapolation on my part, based on WP:AWNB, which luckily held :)).

There was basically one other talk which went into detail about wikis,
by John Turner from PLC in Melbourne
<http://www.acec2008.info/confpapers/paperdetails.asp?pid=7522&docid=822>
e.g. http://horizonproject.wikispaces.com/About+Us . So that is just
using wikis, not Wikipedia. He was cool, I mean he's lucky to be the
head IT guy in a pretty progressive school I gather, but still cool! I
talked to him afterwards and we could perhaps invite ourselves to his
school to check out what they're doing one day, if we wanted.
I think we should collect examples of wiki-related classroom projects
that have happened in Australia, to help make it more concrete and
realistic for educators.

Finally I caught up with Pru Mitchell of edna.edu.au which was great.
(They are a semi-government federal education group that kind of
exists to facilitate and support education-y stuff across state
borders... I think.) They have been very supportive of us (providing
our incorp meeting conference call) so I was very pleased to meet Pru
and find out a bit more about what they do. They had a stall in the
exhibition thingy (most of the other stalls were commercial software
providers) and offered to hand out fliers for us. I kicked myself for
not taking any with me, then! But they will be at VITTA too and with
any luck I will remember to bring some with me that time.

(And for lulz I spent some time talking to the salesperson at the
Encyclopedia Britannica stall. :))

3- Good news, my proposal for a "Free as in Freedom" miniconf at
linux.conf.au (late Jan 2009, Hobart) was accepted! (Miniconf speakers
don't get the perks of main-conference speakers -- they have to pay to
attend, so it's only a good idea if you were kinda planning to go
anyway.) I will write and send out a CfP very soon. Wikimedia-related
topics will naturally be super appropriate!

whew...

cheers,
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/