This week, several education specialists will meet with wiki technologists in Vancouver to discuss the future of MediaWiki as a platform for learning & knowledge generation.

The meeting is organized by the Commonwealth of Learning, which hosts the wikieducator.org project. You can find the agenda on:

http://wikieducator.org/Tectonic_shift_think_tank

It will take place from April 11-13. Participants include Brion Vibber (Wikimedia Foundation CTO), Sandy Britain (lead developer of the eXe elearning editor), Joel Thierstein (Executive Director of the ConneXions project - cnx.org), Murugan Pal (technologist for CK-12, ck12.org), Merrick Schaefer (technologist for UNICEF's wiki projects), Samuel Klein (content coordinator for the One Laptop Per Child Project, laptop.org), and others. The meeting will be facilitated by myself and Wayne Mackintosh (founder of WikiEducator and education specialist for COL).

We will think about issues such as: * What are the best strategies for WYSIWYG editing, wiki decentralization and synchronization, eLearning interfaces and features, semantic annotation and structured data, print support, quality heuristics? * Should MediaWiki be rewritten from scratch to achieve these goals, or is an evolutionary approach more sensible? * What is a sensible model for governance, coordination, and funding of a combined, multi-institutional MediaWiki 2.0 effort?

If you wish to participate remotely, you can still put in your request on the above wiki page. I would also like to encourage you to draft a "vision statement" and to link it under the section "Participants wishlist". Such vision statements will be taken into account if they are submitted before April 13 (ideally before April 11).

I apologize for the short notice - things have taken a rather more ambitious shape than originally very quickly, due to recent meetings and email exchanges. Still, I expect that this is only the first step in opening a very serious discussion about the future of MediaWiki that will involve all key stakeholders. I'd be happy to hear from you.