[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Report to Board: Chinese Internet Research Conference

-------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: Report to Board: Chinese Internet Research Conference Datum: Sun, 27 May 2012 18:07:54 +0200 Von: Ting Chen &lt;tchen(a)wikimedia.org&gt; An: Board list &lt;board-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Hello dear all, at Mai 21st and 22nd I attended the 10. Chinese Internet Research Conference at the University of Southern California and this is my report on this conference. At the begin of the year Andrew Lih, who as you know is maybe one of the first researchers who took Wikipedia as a research topic and certainly a longtime Wikimedian, asked me if I can give a keynote on the 10. Chinese Internet Research Conference that he was organizing. And I said yes. He wanted me to talk about the Chinese Wikipedia, which is a relatively easy topic for me. The first CIRC took place in USC and this is their anniversary and it again went to USC. It was organized by the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Andrew is currently an assistant professor there. There were about 150 attendees of the conference from all arround the world. According to Andrew the number of attendees vary in the years. Last year for example there were only 50 attendees and this year there were more than 100. The attendees are mostly researchers, so university professors, doctoral and graduate students, and a few journalists. The topics of the conference can mainly be grouped in two: The influence of internet on chinese politics and the situation of less previleged peoples and their use of internet in China. On the first topic there are a lot of papers about the microblogging [1]: The community, the influence of the microblogging on the politics (especially on the current events), how the government and the party regulate the microblogging, how they use microblogging as an instrument for themselves, etc. On the second topic there were a handful papers on field studies about the use of internet by the migrant workers, and how internet influenced their work and life, and studies about the use of internet in the rural areas of China in different provinces. To my surprise the papers are all very bold and direct in internet censoring and GFW (Great Firewall). Before I planned my speech I asked Andrew if I should mention the blocking and he said yes, and its influence on the project. I was a little skeptical because meanwhile all Wikipedians I know in China were visited by the National Security there. So in my presentation I didn't mention blocking directly by said that we had connectivity problems. But actually almost all papers on the first topic mentioned censoring and blocking and deleting of blog entries as such. Some of the papers have these topics as their main research area. There were no paper about Wikipedia (my speech doesn't count), but all attendees I spoke with use Wikipedia, independant of where they live and work (US, the Netherlands, France, Singapur, mainland China, Hongkong and Taiwan). To my surprise most of them don't know that we are a nonprofit organization. There were a few questions about if we pay Google to get a high ranking. My speech was the closing speech of the conference. I organized it in three sections: A brief history of the chinese Wikipedia, the current state of the project and what we can offer researchers and how researchers can help us. There were two high-lights for me personally on this conference. One is that I met our Advisory Board member Jing Wang [2] there. When we met each other two years ago in Gdansk Jing just started her work on her project NGC 2.0 in China and she told me that she is very successful in the last two years. Her work there is concentrating on bringing the local NGOs (mostly not registered as organizations, but more grassroot groups) and enterprices together so that entrepreneurs who want to fund charitable works and NGOs who do social works can find each other. In her opinion the central government is more open and progressive then the provincial and local governments. She experiences more troubles with the provincial governments than the central gorvernment (which she stated is very supportive to her work). She believes that between the two there are a lot of room and freedom which one can use and thinks that the art to work in China is to explore that room and freedom. She repeated that we should try to get our chance there. She expressed her sorry about not be able to attend Wikimania this year because at that time she will be in China again, and not be abled to do any work for the Foundation because she is so busy. The other high-light for me I had already mailed you. It was the keynote speech by Jenova Chen [3]. Jenova is a game designer and some of the most remarkable games he designed were Flow [4], Flower [5] and Journey [6]. Especially the design principle of Journey impressed me most. So Jenova said in online games in most cases gamers try to kill each other or try to group with each other to kill something. And he thought this is a very poor social interaction. He thinks that most games explore only one emotion: the power, to be a superhero is in most cases the motive of a game. But the human emotion is more complex. To be able to explore and induce the complex emotion of an attendee for example is the difference between a good movie and a bad movie, or a good book and a bad book. He thinks that the emotion of want to be powerful is a very adolescent one, that is why most mature adults won't play games any more, because they are beyond that level of emotion. So he has two design principles, the first one is to explore the emotional possibilities of a game. The second one is the to create a special environment of communication between the gamers. He says that internet (game, forums, Twitter, whatever<and I can add mailing-list, talk pages and villege pumps>) are mostly hostile. And he wanted to create an environment where gamers can interact with each other, but don't have the possibility to be hostile to each other. So for example by designing Journey he decided to not give the gamers the possibility to chat with each other, but only to interact with each other in a non verbal way. When he was talking I could not help as to think about Wikipedians and how they interact with each other. Naturally, language is the essential of our projects we cannot avoid Wikipedians talking with each other. But then again, people always thought that games can only be successful if they are violent, and Jenova proved that this is not the case. And what his speech told me is, even when we always think that something have to be done in a certain way and only in that way, there are always chances to explore other possibilities. And we should not stop to think about those trying and being innovative, and being innovative in an unconventional way. This is why I think we should invite him as a keynote speaker of Wikimania, or at least for the staff retreat. And why I was so excited after his speech that I mailed you immediately. Greetings Ting References: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging_in_China [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jing_Wang [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenova_Chen [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28video_game%29 [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_%28video_game%29 [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_%282012_video_game%29