No maps for these territories

The excellent Flonight points out on Wikipedia’s village pump that along with International Women’s Day this past Monday, March is Women’s History month in the U.S., and the National Women’s History Project theme this year is “Writing Women Back into History.”

The connection to Wikipedia is obvious. Flonight points out just a handful of possible neglected biographies one could work on, featuring female pilots. This is only the tip of the iceberg; everywhere you look on Wikipedia there are biographies of women that need to be better written, sourced, or added in the first place. Articles like the one about Elsie MacGill, one of my favorite articles that I have worked on in Wikipedia. MacGill was the world’s first female aircraft designer, working in Canada during World War II. She was known as “Queen of the Hurricanes” and was somewhat famous during her lifetime, though has been mostly forgotten since. She went on after her engineering career to earn the Order of Canada for working on commissions for improving the status of women.

As I said, I worked on this article a fair amount, spending time over the course of a few months sourcing it, and I am reasonably confident that the Wikipedia article is currently one of the best resources on the web about this remarkable woman. How many other stories are out there waiting to be researched and written up? Let’s write women — even the ones who are not so famous anymore, but who are pioneers, notable scientists, politicians, engineers, soldiers — let’s write them back into history, and back into the encyclopedia.

Edit: this map of actions everywhere is amazing.
The chant of the day here at UCD’s protests and marches — part of the California-based national Day of Public Education protests, held March 4, the locus of a grassroots uprising and protest movement that has quickly gained steam to include all public education institutions affected by California’s massive budget cuts and beyond — the chant has been:

whose university? our university!

as the largest crowds I have ever seen at UCD march around the quad, assembling a kind of street fair on the union patio, and protest against the fee hikes, the corporatization of the university, the growing inaccessibility of college to those who are poor, disenfranchised, struggling — while our administrative structure grows ever larger, glossier, and more focused on private interests. There is also protest against some acts of hate speech that occurred recently on campus — there was a swastika left on someone’s door, and the LGBT center was vandalized — and there is an underlying current of protest at the world we live in, with its brutal recession and heavy movements of global economics and war and environmental and cultural loss that can sweep along an entire generation, unwillingly. These people are protesting for a place and time and space to be young and smart in, a place to act, a place to be.

(And there is a twitter feed, and a few thousand blogs and union sites and news articles, growing by the hour, if you’d like to follow along).

I should add a disclaimer that I’m writing this on my lunch hour. It is a new thing to me to work at a university during a protest — especially in a position where my job is, partly, to spend university money. I have a responsibility to these angry, idealistic kids to do my job well, while living with the consequences of a broken economy myself: our jobs, our book budgets (and in my case) even our buildings are at risk. Without the rights of faculty, staff have to be careful to not violate their union contracts by striking on the one hand, but not disclaim their responsibilities as community members on the other. And at the end of the day, this is about community: building a better educational community, making education more valued in the larger community, making this community accessible to all.

Going forward, I like to think the projects I care about — building open educational resources, building global communities, supporting tools that help people work together, building and sustaining and teaching people how to use information resources — matter, in this larger context of community. If we are to repair our educational economy, we also have to reclaim publishing rights and make research available through open access and open licenses. We have to not wall the fruits of our intellectual labor off, but share them with the world. We have to make sure all kids have a chance, that people far remote from the University of California and its privileged grounds can benefit from our libraries and our work to collect knowledge. Going forward, we have to work on the information infrastructure to support a better, more open world: the infrastructure that will support a university that is truly, our university.

students block the street at UCD

p.s. as of right this minute UCD students are marching out to block the Freeway onramp, and I have no idea why — seems like a terrible idea, and dangerous. With their kind of numbers, they could easily occupy the admin building again. I agree with my friend Mark that a lot of the radical anti-capitalist language that’s being used is alienating to many, and probably not all that helpful: no one’s happy about the current situation. As such, I think protests need to be careful and measured, and with a clear point.

I thought I had posted the WikiSym CfP already, but apparently not. Reminder:

• the Research paper deadline is March 7, only a week away!
• the workshops deadline is March 21

And yes, this is the conference I am chairing this year! I am very excited to have WikiSym’s intensive research focus co-located with Wikimania, the most vibrant community conference I have ever had the pleasure of attending. WikiSym + Wikimania: Wiki Baltic Summer 2010.

======  CALL FOR PAPERS  ======

W I K I S Y M 2 0 1 0

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

http://wikisym.org/ws2010/Call+for+Papers

July 7-8-9 in Gdańsk, Poland.

Co-located with Wikimania 2010 (Intl. Conference on Wikimedia Foundation projects, http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org).

Peer-reviewed and archived in the ACM Digital Library.

SUMMARY

WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration,
will be held this summer in Gdansk, Poland. Starting this year, WikiSym
aims to explicitly broaden its scope, exploring not only the thriving
wiki community, but also other open movements and open collaboration
initiatives. This includes related areas such as open online communities,
collaborative creation of multimedia content (with or without wikis),
and open journalism and publishing, just to list a few examples.

Furthermore, our goal is to establish WikiSym as a venue for the exchange
of information, experiences and practices among an interdisciplinary
audience, including researchers, practitioners, industry representatives
and experts with a wide variety of different backgrounds.

As a result, WikiSym has established 3 complementary tracks to merge the
contributions from such a diverse community:

• Wiki track: Focused on research in wiki technology,
  wiki websites, wiki communities, and in general any kind
  of initiative pivoting around wiki software.
• Industry track: This new track will focus on the specific
  needs of enterprises and private companies interested in sharing
  and promoting their experiences around wikis and open collaboration
  projects/products/initiatives.
• Open collaboration track: This track is a dedicated venue for sharing research results and experiences in initiatives that may not be built specifically on wiki software, but share the “wiki way” of organization. These may include open collaborations, open communities, and open movements that allow the interchange of ideas and contributions from participants with a range of interests and motivations.

Research manuscripts may be sent to any of these tracks.
However, submitting the same manuscript to more than one
track at the same time is not allowed. Therefore, please
select the most appropriate track for the topic covered in
your manuscript before submitting.

IMPORTANT DATES

• March 7th: Submission deadline for research papers.
• March 21st: Submission deadline for Doctoral Symposium proposals, posters, demonstrations, workshops, panels, tutorials.
• May 4th: Notification of acceptance for research papers.
• May 11th: Notification of acceptance for Doctoral Symposium proposals, posters, workshops, tutorials, panels.
• July 7-9: WikiSym 2010!

Given the interdisciplinary nature of wikis and open
collaboration initiatives, WikiSym invites contributions in
a wide range of fields.

TOPICS OF INTEREST: WIKI TRACK

• Wiki user experiences, usability, and discourse analysis
• Reputation systems and quality assurance processes
• Scalability — social and technical
• Wiki technologies and implementations
• Translation and multilingual wiki content
• Educational applications
• Wikis for non-textual media (images, video, audio)
• Content dynamics and wiki evolution
• Wiki archiving and versioning
• Wiki administration: dealing with abuse and resolving conflict
• Wikis and the semantic web, knowledge management and tacit knowledge
• Wikis for small audiences (departmental and family wikis)
• Legal issues (copyright, licensing)
• Visualization of wiki structure

TOPICS OF INTEREST: INDUSTRY TRACK

• Business opportunities around wikis and open collaboration
• Best practices to adopt wikis and open collaboration in industry
• Information disclosure: practices and experiences
• Community building and support
• Open publishing and open licensing in the industry
• Wikis and open collaboration entrepreneurship
• Coopetition: best practices
• Interaction and synergies between industries and open communities
• Open innovation: strategies and experiences for leaders/followers
• Promotion, support and funding of open collaboration initiatives
• Knowledge management

TOPICS OF INTEREST OPEN COLLABORATION TRACK

• Social software for collaboration and work group processes
• Open online communities
• Technologies for networked collaboration
• Social interactions on the web
• Open and citizen journalism
• Social networks
• Collaborative content creation
• Distributed development of software
• Cooperation for problem resolution
• Information disclosure strategies
• Open call working environments
• Crowdsourcing and information synthesis
• Collaborative multimedia collections
• Distributed content categorization/tagging
• Open publishing
• Commons projects and repositories
• Distributed selection of content

RESEARCH PAPERS

Research papers present integrative reviews or original
reports of substantive new work: theoretical, empirical,
or in the development or deployment of novel systems.
We encourage emphasizing lessons learned and providing a
clear concise message to the audience about the relevance
of the work. The paper must place your work in context
within the field, citing related work and indicating clearly
what aspects of the work are new.

Research papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee
to meet rigorous academic standards of publication.
They should be written in English and must not exceed 10 pages
(for full papers) or 4 pages (for short papers). Papers will
be reviewed both with respect to conceptual quality and
clarity of presentation. Authors of accepted papers are
expected to attend the conference in order to present the paper.

Accepted submissions will be published in the WikiSym
proceedings and archived in the ACM Digital Library.

Submitted papers should use the ACM SIG Proceedings Format, see:

http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

DOCTORAL SYMPOSIUM

The Doctoral Symposium is an interactive forum for doctoral
students to receive present and discuss their doctoral work.
Students who are at least one year away from dissertation
completion are invited to submit to the Doctoral Symposium.
Students beginning their research are especially invited to attend.

To submit a proposal send a 2-3 page description of your
dissertation research, including:

• A description of your work
• The goals—what contributions will your research generate?
• The approach—what is being performed to achieve
  the goals? How will results be validated?

Additionally, your adviser must send a brief statement
of your dissertation progress to date and a statement of
recommendation to the Doctoral Symposium chair.

WORKSHOPS

Workshops provide an opportunity for researchers and
practitioners to discuss and learn about topics that require
extended engagement such as new systems, research methods,
standards and formats. A workshop should require participants
to engage with each other for at least half a day. For shorter
sessions, please consider WikiSym’s open space format.
A workshop proposal should consist of approximately two
pages describing what you intend to do and how your session
will meet the criteria described above. It should include a
concise abstract, proposed time frame (half-day, full-day)
and one-paragraph biographies of all people relevant to the
submission. Workshop proposals will be reviewed and selected
for their interest to the community. Each workshop will be
allocated a half-day or a full-day and a room.

PANELS

Panels provide an interactive forum for bringing together
people with interesting points of view to discuss compelling
wiki issues. Panels involve participation from both the
panelists and audience members in a lively discussion.
Proposals for panels should consist of approximately two pages
describing what you intend to do and how your session will
meet the criteria described above. It should include a concise
abstract and one-paragraph biographies of all panelists. A panel
submission will be reviewed and selected for their interest to
the community. Each panel will be given a 90-minute time slot.

POSTERS

Poster presentations enable researchers to present late-breaking
results, significant work in progress, or work that is best communicated
in conversation. WikiSym’s lively poster sessions let conference attendees
exchange ideas one-on-one with authors, and let authors discuss their
work in detail with those attendees most deeply interested in the topic.

Poster proposals may describe original research, engineering, or
experience reports. Submissions should consist of a two-page extended
abstract outlining the content of the poster. Successful applicants will
be invited to display a poster, 1×2m in size, at a special plenary
session of the Symposium.

DEMONSTRATIONS

Wikis are intended to be used, and no format is better suited for
demonstrating the utility of new wiki research and technology than showing
and using it. If you would like to demonstrate new features or products,
this is the place! Demonstrations give presenters an opportunity to show
running systems and gather feedback. Demo submissions will be reviewed
based on their relevance to the community. A submission should be one
page in length, with a title and a short description of the demo.
The description should include what you plan to demonstrate, what you
hope to get out of demoing, and how the audience will benefit. A short
note of any special technical requirements may be included.

HOW TO SUBMIT

Please submit your research papers in PDF format through our research
paper submission system (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wikisym2010).

For all other papers and proposals, please email the respective
chair (see below).

All accepted submissions will be published in the proceedings and
archived in the ACM Digital Library.

Submitted work in all categories should use the ACM SIG Proceedings
Format, see: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

Questions regarding submissions may be directed at the respective chair
using the following email addresses:

• Workshops: workshops@wikisym.org
• Demonstrations/Tutorials: demos@wikisym.org
• Posters: posters@wikisym.org
• Doctoral Symposium: docsym@wikisym.org

General questions should be directed at chair@wikisym.org.

SYMPOSIUM COMMITTEE

• Phoebe Ayers, University of California at Davis, USA; Symposium Chair
• Felipe Ortega, GSyC/Libresoft, University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain; Programme Chair
• Dirk Riehle, Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg; Treasurer
• Felipe Ortega, GSyC/Libresoft, University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain; Wiki Track Chair
• Martin Cleaver, Blended Perspectives, Canada; Industry Track Chair
• Giota Alevizou, Institute of Educational Technology, Open University, UK; Open Collaboration Track Chair
• Pattarawan Prasarnphanich, Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration, Thailand; Posters Chair
• Andreea Gorbatai, Harvard University, USA; Workshops Chair
• Stuart Geiger, Georgetown University; Wikimedia Liason
• Stuart Geiger, Georgetown University; Publicity Co-Chair (Academia-US)
• Yoshifumi Masunaga, Aoyama Gakuin University; Publicity Co-Chair (Asia-Pacific)
• Philipp Schmidt, University of the Western Cape, South Africa; Publicity Co-Chair (Africa)
• Mayo Fuster Morell, European University Institute, Italy; Publicity Co-Chair (Open Collaboration)
• Ward Cunningham, AboutUs.org and Cunningham & Cunningham, USA; Honorary Member
• James Noble, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; Honorary Member
• Ted Ernst, AboutUs.org, USA; Open Space Facilitator
• Marc Laporte, TikiWiki CMS/Groupware, Canada; Webmaster

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Please visit http://wikisym.org/ws2010 to obtain the most up-to-date list of reviewers and collaborators included in our Programme Committee.

Listen. Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.

So begins The Hakawati, a novel by Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese-American author who interweaves the magical stories of the Middle East with the story of a young man growing up in Beirut in the ’70s and his family, chief among them his grandfather the Hakawati: the storyteller, also known as al-Kharrat, the liar.

Chapter by chapter, the stories continue: engrossing, hilarious, ribald, and the family saga deepens, the way they do with time. These are classic stories, some of the best tales in the world — Fatima, Baybars, Ishmael — but retold with punch and violence and heartache and sillyness they take the reader on their own series of Arabian nights. And the real Arabian nights punctuate it: what is it like to live through so many wars, in the world of pigeons and stories? I finished this long book over five nights, and found myself during the day wondering what would happen next, feeling compelled to keep going. I highly recommend it.

Joe Janes wrote a column about Wikipedia in the latest American Libraries. And then I posted a big-ass comment about why librarians should edit Wikipedia (which they published, happily).

ZOMG WORLDS COLLIDING LOOK OUT ABORT ABORT

(For the Wikipedians who may read this, Professor Janes taught me a lot of what I know about how to do reference and how to Think Like a Librarian ™. For the librarians who may read this: trying to convince other people to edit Wikipedia is basically what I spend a lot of my time doing).

Which reminds me: in my last post, about things I’d like to see happen in Wikimedia, I made a rather flip comment about there not being any outreach to libraries. This, of course, is totally untrue, as Pharos of the amazing New York City Wikimedia chapter reminded me. They have done some fabulous outreach with NYPL, having editing days in the library and also teaching librarians how to edit. Pharos has also started a page about such cultural projects.

There’s also been several moves to work with university libraries, and a lot of unprompted work within the library community as well, such as a workshop held at ALA Midwinter before last and run by my friend Ken. And I guess I shouldn’t forget our outreach to the amazing Biblioteca Alexandrina, the new Library of Alexandria, who hosted Wikimania 2008 and remains a partner.

I just want to see more! There’s so much to do.

This is a followup to my post from last June, exactly eight months ago, where I listed several things I wished would happen in Wikimedia, including better outreach materials, better communication with researchers, better event support, and reader feedback tools.

To date, two items on the list has been fully accomplished — the books extension has been re-installed on the English Wikipedia, and has been improved, so it’s now easy to create your own print-on-demand collections of articles. This is awesome. The second item is that thanks to the hard work of Erik Zachte and Tomasz Finc, Wikimedia stats are back and better than ever. This is doubly awesome. (Though we could still probably promote their awesomeness a bit better).

A few other things have been worked on:

• The researchers group, coming out of a productive discussion at last year’s WikiSym, have drafted a proposed research policy. This needs support and discussion, however, and hasn’t been followed up by the WMF that I am aware of. Outreach between Wikimedia and Wikimedia researchers is also one of my goals for this year’s WikiSym.
• The Bookshelf project has been working on materials for teachers. I’m uncertain what the status of this project is currently, but their goal is to produce a wide range of outreach and educational materials about the projects, and they have done a lot of hard background research into what’s needed.
• Outreach to the cultural commons is happening with exciting projects all over the world, including several amazing image donation to Commons, partnerships with museums, and general outreach (such as the upcoming Wikipedia workshop at Museums and the Web, which I’ll be involved in). Outreach to libraries, however, is still sadly lacking (something I feel some personal responsibility for!)
• The reader feedback extension has been worked on, but I haven’t heard anything about it for a long time — what’s the status?

My personal congratulations to everyone who’s been involved with the above projects.

Some items from my old list haven’t been really worked on yet, though, and could stand to be reiterated. In the interest of being constructive and not just griping, I’m offering some ideas for solutions, too.

• Brochures: We still desperately need a one page handout and a basic, simple press kit about Wikipedia/Wikimedia that any volunteer can download and use for when they might be having a small event, are manning a booth about Wikipedia, etc.
  • ideas: While the bookshelf project continues to work on producing these items, another idea proposed at the last big SF-Bay meetup was to have a “documents jam,” a community get-together in which we write up these fliers for the immediate purpose of having something to hand out at Maker Faire in May, but the subsidiary purpose of helping improve these documents.We’re definitely going to do this in the relatively near future, so I hope some good work comes out of it.
• Events support: we still need better support for events large and small, like an events calendar, where Wikimedia events around the world are outlined (especially for times like this spring, when a dozen things are going on at once); and we need better support for future Wikimania teams, such as a Wikimania committee.
  • Ideas: I haven’t formed an events commitee (yet) but I have started some pages on meta: sign up if you want to be (or already are) part of the informal Wikimania support group. I also started a checklist project — the 101 things to do to make a conference — it needs help and love from others.
  • Jon and I also did some brainstorming about how to make an events calendar work; we played around with Google calendar, but really we should probably have an on-wiki calendar.
• Announcements mailing list: this isn’t hard, but still needs to be done (and requires technical intervention). There was a lot of discussion about this last fall, when Foundation-l blew up and there was a lot of drama about posting volume (which I participated in fairly loudly, so apologies to everyone who’s sick of hearing me talk about it).
  • ideas: I don’t think there would be any objections really to an announcements mailing list; it just needs critical momentum and posting rules. Suggestion: someone with lists.wikimedia.org access creates wmf-announcements-l; I’ll volunteer to be the initial moderator. Rules: all posts are moderated; all languages welcome; all posts are announcements of some sort relating explicitly to Wikimedia projects, and all posts are mirrored to Foundation-l for further discussion. These are basically the suggestions that came out of the discussions last fall.

And finally, a new idea that has been on my mind lately:

• Wikimedia speakers bureau: We need a list of Wikimedians who are willing to speak at events and workshops, sorted by three criteria — geographic area, language and area of expertise. This would be incredibly useful both internally and externally — I’ve been on both sides of the fence, as a Wikipedia speaker with a lot of invitations and as an event planner trying to get speakers. Trust me, we need it.
  • ideas: a meta page, facilitated by the chapters and the public outreach project. Requests that cannot be filled directly could be triaged by public outreach, who could go down the list of potential speakers. A longer and more detailed list could be kept privately, for such triaging purposes. The list should include folks like board members, adv board members, etc, with the understanding that those folks are probably busy and high profile requests may go through the Foundation.
  • Note: we have something like this with the press contacts list, but press contact =/= potential public speaker for events. (I am the latter, but assuredly not the former).

Whatchya’ll think?

me: “i have all the harry potter dvd collection i am a big fan of harry potter i have seen every movie he has made”
Dear OKCupid,
I do not think I am actually a 70% match with this person.
kthxbai.
love, me.

Austin: lol
I think Harry Potter is a really cool guy
He casts spells and doesn’t afraid of anything

me: and he makes movies in his spare time.
he started with this arthouse flick in college.
he was dabbling with a performing arts major, though his parents wanted him to be a doctor.
it’s b/w, 16mm, and focuses on the tragedy of youthful pot smoking.

Austin: I think I saw that one

me: heavy fadeouts characterize these scenes of young men lounging on a stairwell…
symbolizing their journey from one platform to another.
Potter used the landings as symbolic places of transformation, where being stoned could mean a rise (highlighted by washed out roof scenes) or unfortunate slide down the banister
interspersed with long-shots down the abyss of the stairwell, bringing to mind classic noir explorations of the human tragedy.
While amateurish…
critics agree that this art-house sensibility and tendency to focus on internal turmoil served Potter well when, in later life, he went to work for James Cameron

Austin: There was a certain je ne se quoi about them, I agree

me: on a series of blockbusters that grossed eleventybillion knuts.

me: “I never knew,” said a gushing and proud Mrs. Weasley on the red carpet,
“that my adopted son’s irritating teenage angst would find such a productive home on celluloid.”

Austin: The Dursley family could not be reached for comment, but reliable sources gauge their reaction as less than merry.

me: the evening was memorable not least because of the gala costumes and Hollywood’s finest
but a shocking moment defined the night
when Professor Snape scrambled onto stage while Harry was hoisting his Oscar
“Now, I’ma gonna let you finish, Harry,” he said, slightly out of breath
“but I just want you to know that Malfoy deserves this award.”

Harry, slightly shocked, managed to choke out “I’d like to thank the academy and J.K. Rowling” before they cut to commercial — making snappy comebacks had never been a strong point. The auditorium, naturally, erupted.

While some speculated that Snape’s behavior was due to snapping under the pressure of being satirized in so many lolphotos and steamy fanfics online, others just thought he was a jerk.

Austin: Others wondered why an acknowledged murderer was still walking free, much less being invited to an award show.

me: but insiders knew that this was just Hollywood at work.