Society of Wikimaniacs November 5, 2005, 20:00 UTC irc.freenode.net#wikimania
Present : _sj_, akl, Alkivar, Angela, AnyFile, brettstil, brion, Chris_Parham, delphine, e2m__, EricaG, gwdash, JamesF, jikomboe, MikeSnow, mysekurity, Phroziac, randy_f, reagleBRKLN, sasha_ (asw), Shanel, shekhar, Solensean, TitaniumDreads,
...but silent : Bdka, cathyma, Chiacomo, CraigSpurrier, da_didi, GerardM, Get_It, here, mattis, MichaelDiederich, poli_, Rdsmith4, SabineCretella, soufron, SvenDowideit, tobacman, tractor, zwitter ...and away : AppleBoy, Austin, GhostFreeman, JeLuF, mark, Rince, Schuyler, SethIlys,
1. Long before the meeting, Alkivar links to [[Jason Scott Sadofsky]] ("a computer history archivist... who is humorously anti-wikipedia") and suggests he would make a good speaker. Also notes that on campus you can have better parties later than you can elsewhere in town.
2. e2m__ asked if attendees from Asia, Africa, and South America will be particularly welcome. The meeting is just starting, and this is never answered... are they? See also the discussion of conference goals, below.
Via email, Node suggested organizing travel groups of people from similar countries / languages, to help them get used to the new environment; and to offer partner-interpreters (for each group?) -- to encourage people with poor English skills to attend who normally avoid such international events. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimania_2006#International_outreach
3. Time sensitive issues first : dates for the conference? There are 3 promising weekends : July 22-23, July 29-30, and August 5-6. The weekend in August seems to be the easiest for people to schedule, but may be more expensive for flights from Europe.
3A - Todo: compare flight prices for these dates.
3B - Harvard professional schools start late for the US, but early for Europe. UK high schools get out late, will still be in session mid-July (so flights might be cheaper).
3C - Anyfile did a quick price search; prices were the same for those two weekends. Group & corporate flight discounts were mentioned.
4. Working with the Harvard dorm & room offices : the [room] office hasn't sorted out their schedule yet; will get to it "very soon".
UPDATE: The optimal week[end] for dorms is in early August (we could get any combination of dorms we want, up to 450 beds). Still waiting on room details.
5. Amgine: will the whole event be at the Harvard Law School? Answer: No. The MIT Media Lab wants to host some smaller events, even all of the hacking days. They've also offered to book their largest hall, Kresge auditorium, if we want to use it.
6. Where is there food? Places mentioned : The Harkness Commons (next door), on-campus caterers (cheers from the local union member), nearby restaurants around Harvard & Kendall Square.
7. Timeline : budget 3 months for travel preparation after acceptnace of papers, for the most difficult cases. CfP in January, December; give initial acceptances by April.
8A : Next meeting - when is good? rotate every meeting by 15.2 days? Pick two times and switch between them? Have multiple meetings on some weeks? We settle on the second option. Next meeting tentatively set for 1600 UTC, Saturday November 19.
8B : Have short meetings and keep most discussion on [Meta]. Clean out the Wikimania wiki and decide if want the site to be a wiki next year.
9A. What should the conference goals be? We agree generally that it should support the online communities, and be a party and social gathering; and that it should involve "a conference". We had some trouble defininzg 'conference.' How could we describe the community and academic parts of Wikimania more clearly? Is international outreach important? Increasing the visibility of small projects? Increasing outreach to underrepresented languages? Should the goals for this year be different than they were last year?
9B. Naming : JamesF liked "symposium" better than conference, but didn't find broad support . (Wikisym's use of the term was noted.) Mysekurity suggested "the [N]th First Annual" conference, a la the Ignobels. MikeSnow chimed in with "Wikimania 2.0".
10. Design, logos, mascots. Mysekurity wanted a logo contest. This met with some definite opposition. Conference t-shirts and laptop stickers, however... JamesF dreams of having a different shirt from each wikimania in 20 years. Delphine suggests a confernce mascot... a new one every year. (the Wikipedia worm? Bob the Angry Sunflower? a dolphin? a weasel? a marmot?)
11. Advisors : Sj brings up Tthe idea of a general advisory panel -- representatives from outside the community, from different parts of the world, who could suggest and provide intros to potential speakers and sponsors. Chris Parham noted the structure doesn't have to be formal, but that getting people involved in this way would be helpful. Delphine wanted to know what the advisors would do, other than advising the program team.
12. Announcements. Will there be announcements on the main WP page[s]? A sitewide notice? When, for how long? At the first opportunity to sign up, before a major paper/registration deadline? It is noted that sitewide notices were put up last year on fr:wp, to some complaints, but not on en:wp.
13. Media streaming. Mysekurity: webcam streams? audio? Mysekurity: will it be broken down into 'important' and 'not important' segments? Akl: as long as there's someone to do it... mysekurity would be glad to '''help''' (emphasis his :)
14. Feedback from attendees and presenters. Attendees from last year want a social list to keep up with friends from Wikimania. Other feedback already left on meta needs to be reviewed.
15. Licensing of papers. General agreement: ask speakers to agree to a reasonably free license, and to audio/video reproduction if they're being recorded, well ahead of time.
16. Conference planning software. No word from Austin, Jakob, or Patrick; it is generally agreed that a license agreement on paper submission makes sense. JamesF mentions that he was at some point happy to help Austin improve on last year's reg system; regrets mentioning it again :-) It is also agreed we should choose our program planning software in time for the program team to look at it.
17. Program team and Papers This team is one of the first to act. How will it be structured? Who will be on it? Who will lead it? We should get help from outside the community; technologists and academics (e.g., Sunir, others from Wikimania '05?) methodically split up papers into review groups. Amgine notes CfPs should have a postmark deadline. Delphine says there should be a very official, and a secret unofficial deadline. Sj suggests having an early deadline for people who need advnce notice; Delphine said she will pay Sj a beer if anyone submits a paper early. Mysekurity: will papers be physical, on a wiki? will they be editable / commentable by others before the event? Delphine notes she would not like that.
18. Other teams Website and conf-software are also needed soon. Ditto general conference organization. How should the organization be divided? Should they be split into formal committees? Do we need to hire people to coordinate the volunteers, or have an external conference organizer? Sj noted there is an agenda item on the upcoming board meeting re: hiring an organizer for Wikimania.
19. Multilingualism Soleansan thinks we should translate papers into Swahili, "or at least in Réunion creole," so people don't get the impression that WP is only English, or only for English-speakers. Alkivar thinks we need Fr/Es/De translations for every major speaker. Delphine suggests waiting until registration is opened and we see who signs up. akl notes that in Frankfurt, none of the German attendees needed translations. . Sj added that we know hardly any relevant presenters who don't speak in English, but if we had a better way of finding/filtering potential speakers, we might find them. Delphine suggests spending money on travel sponsorships and visas, and not on translation.. But we didn't release the CfP in too many languages last year... can sj evaluate a Russian paper? via a translator. (e.g., the Chinese-language paper submitted last year) akl wants to know if the next irc meeting will be held in swahili, russian or in chinese? :)
20. Closure and followups Two hours was a bit long. Follow-ups on the wiki:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimania_2006/En#November_5_discussion
++SJ
SJ wrote:
- Time sensitive issues first : dates for the conference? There are
3 promising weekends : July 22-23, July 29-30, and August 5-6. The weekend in August seems to be the easiest for people to schedule, but may be more expensive for flights from Europe.
As a note: SIGGRAPH 2006 will also be in Boston, runing July 30-August 3. For people who might want to hit both conferences (me, anyway ;) this could make the August 5-6 weekend very convenient.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
SJ wrote:
- Time sensitive issues first : dates for the conference? There are
3 promising weekends : July 22-23, July 29-30, and August 5-6. The weekend in August seems to be the easiest for people to schedule, but may be more expensive for flights from Europe.
Brion notes:
As a note: SIGGRAPH 2006 will also be in Boston, runing July 30-August 3.
And Danah:
Blogher will be running July 28-29.
So that's a SIGGRAPH vote not to have Hacking days after the weekend of July 29-30, but to perhaps have Wikimania the weekend after; and a Blogher vote not to have Wikimania the weekend of July 29-30.
The other two potential weekends we mentioned, for completeness (which we mentioned briefly at the meeting) : June 24-25 and July 15-16. (July 4 week has its own set of problems.)
UPDATE: The events/rooms office still isn't sure of their summer construction schedule, but wrote yesterday that July 13-16 in particular we could almost surely have our pick of rooms; and that, on the other hand, we might not be able to use the medium-sized rooms in Austin Hall that first week of August.
- Conference planning software. No word from Austin, Jakob, or
Patrick; it is generally agreed that a license agreement on paper submission makes sense. JamesF mentions that he was at some point happy to help Austin improve on last year's reg system; regrets mentioning it again :-) It is also agreed we should choose our program planning software in time for the program team to look at it.
Just to clarify - Austin, Jakob and Patrick all discussed this on the mailing list and wiki before the meeting; 'no word' in my notes just meant that noone who knew the score was there to comment during/just before the last meeting. Since getting the program on track is one of our most pressing deadlines, let's discuss this more before the next meeting, and perhaps even look at some images or compare experiences then.
We should have a separate meeting focused on the program team and organization; if you're interested in this kind of work, please think about when you are free the week of November 21, and at least note interest here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimania_2006#Future_meetings
(okay a few errors will be okay if it open source and they will be fixed soon), but please no alpha testing i think we will get more papers than last year and we will come realy in trouble. Deplhine wrote that she don't want pentadwarf because it's need new browsers, but how manny people will effect by this. Only the programm team and for tham it wouldn't be a problem to use a new firefox, or?
Pentabarf does seem cool. I'd like to get a what-the-hack organizer to comment on how it was for them to use it, assuming that they weren't also among the primary developers... could someone who knows the WTH folks ask them for input?
Ed Poor writes:
Conference goals should be:
- Enhance community interaction: make it more fun to be a Wikipedian / WikiMedian!
- Improve the quality of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
Another unanswered goal question, as the definition of who is a 'wikipedian/wikimedian' is vague : should Wikimania help broaden the community of editing Wikimedians? Should it try to involve active users of the projects who are not active editors? Should it be reserved for academics, great speakers, and people donating editing-time or money to the projects?
++SJ
Hi everybody,
I'm very sorry that i didn't was at the IRC meeting because i didn't noticed the date. Also i have realy a lot to do in the moment and i was ill in this week. But i hope i can make some comments :-)
9B. Naming : JamesF liked "symposium" better than conference, but didn't find broad support . (Wikisym's use of the term was noted.) Mysekurity suggested "the [N]th First Annual" conference, a la the Ignobels. MikeSnow chimed in with "Wikimania 2.0".
There also was a Wikiposium in Austria: http://www.ocg.at/kultur/wikiposium.html
But the name sound to academic. I would like more Wikimania 2.0 but with that I'm thinking about a stable vision and a sentence like "edit this conference" will not fit.
- Conference planning software. No word from Austin, Jakob, or
Patrick; it is generally agreed that a license agreement on paper submission makes sense. JamesF mentions that he was at some point happy to help Austin improve on last year's reg system; regrets mentioning it again :-) It is also agreed we should choose our program planning software in time for the program team to look at it.
Okay here are my words ;-): I'm not a developer so wanna have (if you like to have me in the programm team again) a software that is running (okay a few errors will be okay if it open source and they will be fixed soon), but please no alpha testing i think we will get more papers than last year and we will come realy in trouble. Deplhine wrote that she don't want pentadwarf because it's need new browsers, but how manny people will effect by this. Only the programm team and for tham it wouldn't be a problem to use a new firefox, or?
- Program team and Papers
This team is one of the first to act. How will it be structured? Who will be on it? Who will lead it? We should get help from outside the community; technologists and academics (e.g., Sunir, others from Wikimania '05?) methodically split up papers into review groups. Amgine notes CfPs should have a postmark deadline. Delphine says there should be a very official, and a secret unofficial deadline. Sj suggests having an early deadline for people who need advnce notice; Delphine said she will pay Sj a beer if anyone submits a paper early.
I agree to delphine. After the last office deadline comes some realy good papers. So we taked tham. The secrest deadline was the day where we was making the programm. I also think there would be mutch early subissions exspecialy if you say the deadline is or people who need ad. notice.
Mysekurity: will papers be physical, on a wiki? will they be editable / commentable by others before the event? Delphine notes she would not like that.
I would love that. Because we sould be always a little bit more open (also with scientific papers) than everybody else. The realy kewl thing is that people who cant come to the confernece can make somment before and maybe get there answer. Also editing a paper would not be a problem. Because you can see who has editing it. What we can make is a link to the original version or something like that. Please make this confernece not like very other conferece. Alow the people to try new things, play with the wiki.
But what we need is a flag what can set by the author after the conference that editing is over, after that the paper should be transfered in a non editable version. The versions can be also used to make some proceding.
I will be there at the next IRC meeting.
CU there
PatrickD
In case it matters, the women's blogging conference Blogher will be running July 28-29. I know many people who will be attending that who would love to attend Wikimania (self included).
danah
On Nov 10, 2005, at 6:23 PM, SJ wrote:
- Time sensitive issues first : dates for the conference? There are
3 promising weekends : July 22-23, July 29-30, and August 5-6. The weekend in August seems to be the easiest for people to schedule, but may be more expensive for flights from Europe.
- - - - - - - - - - d a n a h ( d o t ) o r g - - - - - - - - - - "taken out of context i must seem so strange"
musings :: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts
wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org