The International Symposium on Wikis

One more suggestion if you’re already around Oporto: Open air movie sessions. Here are  the next sessions, when and where they will take place:

“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (2007)

When: August 22nd

Where: Palácio de Cristal Gardens

“Made of Honour” (2008)

When: August 23rd

Where: Mouzinho de Albuquerque Square (Boavista Roundabout)

“Fool’s Gold” (2008)

When: August 29th

Where:Nove de April Square (Arca d’Água Gardens)

“Hancock” (2008)

When: August 30th

Where: S. João Fort (Foz)

All sessions begin at 9 pm.

Before WikiSym happens, there is plenty of time to visit Oporto, if you’re already around. So, here are some suggestions of what you can do while visiting our town.

Concerts

“Noites Ritual Rock” (17th edition)

This music festival is held at Palácio de Cristal Gardens (Crystal Palace Gardens), on August 29th and 30th. This year’s edition will feature Sam The Kid, Tiago Bettencourt and Mantha, Rita Redshoes, Buraka Som Sistema, Linda Martini and more. All portuguese artists, as usual. The concerts begin at 21:30 and the entrance is free. During the day, there will also be other activities, such as exhibitions, video sessions and theatre plays.

“Beat It” - Electronic Music Festival

This festival will be held on September 6th, at the University of Porto’s Sports Centre Stadium (Campo Alegre, Porto). It will feature Etienne de Crecy, Ladytron, David Carreta and more. See the poster on the left (only available in Portuguese for the moment).

Museums

There are museums to visit, some more emblematic, some less known, but all worth it. Starting with something well-known, you can visit Serralves Foundation and Contemporary Art Museum, seeing not only the exhibitions about Manoel de Oliveira (the famous Portuguese filmmaker) and David Goldblatt, but taking the Garden tour as well.

Other museum to visit is the Soares dos Reis Museum, Portugal’s first Nacional Museum.

Alda Silva

We are happy to announce a WikiSym 2008 panel on end-user programming with application wikis. Panelists will be Ludovic Dubost, Stewart Nickolas, and Peter Thoeny, and of course you, readers of this blog and participants at WikiSym, as we are hoping to make this as engaging as possible. Please let us know what questions we should ask the panelists by commenting on this blog entry or by asking them in person at WikiSym 2008!

ABSTRACT

Wikis empower users to collaborate with each other using prose. Users imprint data structures and processes onto wiki pages using social and technical conventions. Application wikis enhance wiki engines with lightweight programming features that aid in making data structures and processes explicit. Using these features, end-users can program a wiki to better support them in their collaborative processes and integrate their work into the overall IT infrastructure. Application wikis make database access and business process integration easy from within the wiki while maintaining the wiki-style of collaborative work. The panelists of this panel, together with the audience and the moderator, will review existing work and explore future research directions in application wikis.

About the Panelists

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In answer to a Research Fellow in a Department of Sociology at a UK university:

[I received a letter from Wikisym] re: submitting a paper:

In a number of cases, the most interesting aspects of your paper might be submitted as a poster or demonstration proposal. I would very much like you to consider this as well.

The conference website gives a deadline for poster submissions on June 30.

How should we proceed? Should we still aim for a poster or prepare a more informal presentation to be given during one of the open sessions of WikiSym?

We would love to have as much feedback as possible from the wiki developer/researcher community on this service proposal.

What is in your opinion the best way to present this?

We responded:

The June 30th deadline for posters was for those that wanted to be considered for inclusion in the ACM abstracts.

We are happy to continue to receive and consider posters on an informal basis.

Regards and thanks,
Martin.

I hope this clears up any confusion.

CALL FOR PAPERS

First Workshop on “Interdisciplinary Research on Wiki Communities”, on September 8, 2008, at WikiSym 2008, Porto, Portugal, September 8-10, 2008

Introduction

The array of approaches to studying wikis is a source of wealth but also a possible source of confusion: What are appropriate methodologies for the analysis of wiki communities? Which are the most critical parameters (both quantitative and qualitative) for study in wiki evolution and outcomes? Is it possible to find effective interdisciplinary approaches to augment our overall understanding of these dynamic creative environments?
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Early Registration for WikiSym 2008 is possible until 20th July. By registering early you save your money and you also help us organize a better WikiSym 2008 Conference Program.

Advance registration will be possible until 25th August. After that, only onsite registrations are accepted.

Thanks!

Hi all,

Thank you for bearing with us!

So, after many hours of deliberation, the posters and demo team have completed their evaluations. I have just finished sending out the notifications. If you have submitted something and have not received an answer it is important that you contact me (demosandposters@wikisym.org) before Monday 21 July.

Similar to papers, posters were subjected to peer review. Each poster proposal was reviewed by at least three committee members and some, especially those we couldn’t take, were read by five or six separate reviewers.

Unlike papers, however, posters didn’t need to show depth of research rigour. Instead, posters were selected on the basis of clarity and relevance to the wiki community, coupled with originality, utility and degree of innovation. Nevertheless, some posters did show such rigour and those now have the option to be included into the ACM Proceedings as an ACM-DL abstract. ACM inclusion may not be appropriate or matter in every case but should the author choose inclusion in the ACM proceedings, the final copy needs to be submitted for July 26, 2008. Of the 26 demo/poster proposals submitted, we accepted 11 candidates for the ACM.

Some posters or demo submitters received letters asking them to clarify what they intend to show. An example of this is where the topic looks really interesting but there was no obvious pathway as to how they met their goal. Those people are welcome to reformulate their poster, and, we will help you evolve your submission. Due to the Jul 26 ACM deadline, posters reworked this way are unlikely to be ready for the ACM proceedings. We will continue to be keen to bring all late-breaking news as last-minute posters, so you still get to share and discuss your findings with your peers in the industry.

Finally, we have OpenSpace/UnConference track for the conference. This means that even ideas that haven’t been written may well be fantastic ingredients to these dynamic conversations. Everyone has the opportunity to present and you may find that you are able convey verbally your ideas to engage your fellow participants at WikiSym2008.

Regards,

Martin

Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA
WikiSym 2008 Demos and Posters Chair
http://www.BlendedPerspectives.com/

Things have gotten a little hectic here at WikiSym.

Even with our responses for your paper submissions now back to you, our team has not yet completed our promised review of the posters and demo submissions. We haven’t forgotten!

To meet demand, I’ve just recruited a couple of extra volunteers for this task (I can’t tell you who, just yet, of course ;)); I hope we’ll be done by Thursday.

We’ve had some further excellent submissions. So, thank you: both for your efforts and your patience.

Martin.

Stewart Nickolas, creator of IBM’s QEDWiki, working in the Emerging Technologies group in IBM for the past five years, will be a keynote speaker at WikiSym 2008.

We interviewed him by e-mail to know more about his involvement with wikis and web-related issues, concretely OpenAjax and application wikis.

Q: How is the OpenAjax Alliance related to wikis?

The OpenAjax organization was created a few years ago and is dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based web technologies. Within the Alliance there are several working groups actively addressing key challenges in achieving interoperability across the many Ajax toolkits. Some of the challenges include: How can toolkits coexist on a single page without corrupting the page? How do toolkits communicate with one another on the same page? How are widgets described in a common way so that aggregation canvases such as Wikis, Mashup Makers and traditional IDEs can use the widgets? Through our work with QEDWiki we recognized the importance of hosting content from multiple providers. Each content provider may use different Ajax toolkits to deliver a rich experience within a single page. To address this problem we originally developed a proprietary proof-of-concept technology for QED; however, we felt it was necessary to have open standards to enable and extend the content delivery ecosystem around Wikis, Mashups & content providers.

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Tim Berners-Lee’s intended the web to be writeable by all. Yet, for decades it’s been stuck in a “read mostly” mode. Everyone web surfs, some add content but very few really get to fundamentally re-express and re-structure web content. We know this. We wiki. Problem is, many don’t.

It is hoped that the icon will draw contributions to wiki-based sites, by serving as a reminder to how changeable they are.

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