Tue, Aug 08, 2006
WikiMania 2006: Quick Hits and Final Thoughts
#
I really enjoyed WikiMania, but it felt distinctly different than last
year. A big part of it was personal. The conference was held in
Cambridge, my home for four years, so the location itself was
familiar and uninteresting. I was only there for three days, whereas
last year I came early for Hacking Days, where I had a chance to get
to know people better at my leisure. I also had much more on my mind,
whereas last year, I was fully present the whole time -- morning,
noon, and night. (L0E)
Part of it was the conference itself. It wasn't as international as
last year, but it was still quite good -- one out of four attendees
were from outside of the States. There were also more visitors, folks
new to Wikis who came to see what this stuff was all about. Several
of these people were fairly high-level,
described by JasonCalacanis as "folks who ride on the back of
builders." (L0F)
The same held true for RecentChangesCamp earlier this year, except the
spirit was quite different. There, the visitors were eager to learn
and to participate, and the community embraced them. Here, many
visitors stayed at arm's length, choosing to observe from afar rather
than immerse themselves in this wonderful community. At WikiMania
last year, a different group of us would go out every night, laughing,
sharing stories, mixing with other groups. This year, there were more
clusters, more silos. I saw people -- especially the visitors --
sticking with the folks they knew, rather than mixing with others. (L0G)
That is not our community's way, and I found it mildly distressful.
To some extent, it's the price of success -- especially true in the
case of Wikipedia -- and the result of the culture that those not
acclimated to Wikis bring to the table. To a large extent, process is
at fault. I find it fascinating that a community schooled in
self-organization and the value of emergence continues to organize
top-down gatherings. If it's not careful, WikiMania may eventually go
the way of LinuxWorld, Comdex, and many other conferences that began
as a wonderful, generative community gathering and eventually became a
meeting place for fast-talking salespeople. (L0H)
Despite my standing in the Wiki community, I'm an outsider to
Wikipedia, and I only have three ways of encouraging a shift in how
WikiMania operates. The first and best way is to become active in the
community and in the planning of the next conference. In an
alternative world, this would have already happened, but the reality
is that it's not likely. The second and worst way is to preach to the
folks in the community, which I've been doing. I find this
distasteful. It's my personality to effect change, not to talk about
it. (L0I)
The third way is to create a space where people can learn for
themselves and to catalyze that learning as much as possible. This,
in a nutshell, is the purpose of BlueOxenAssociates. I've had some
success in this area. The FLOSS
Usability Sprints exposed some folks to effective collaborative
processes, including one of the original BarCamp
organizers. I was then able to point to BarCamp as a model for the
RecentChangesCamp organizers, who wanted to bring OpenSpace to the
Wiki community. Both the usability sprints and BarCamp helped spawn
DCamp, the BarCamp for the
usability community. Our "Tools
for Catalyzing Collaboration" workshops have inspired a number of
people to pursue similar event models. (L0J)
In addition to helping the tech community learn about face-to-face
collaborative processes, I've also helped other communities -- from
Planetwork to the WorldEconomicForum -- learn how online collaborative
spaces can complement physical ones. (L0K)
All of this is just the start. I have bigger and better things in the
works. More importantly, the meme is starting to spread. I've helped
initiate some of this, but there are many other sparks, and others are
starting to fan the flames. We will learn how to collaborate more
effectively. But it will take time. (L0L)
I'm sounding a bit ominous, and it's an exaggeration of how I actually
feel. As I said before, all in all, WikiMania was wonderful. When
you bring great people together and get out of the way, great things
happen. Even if there are minor obstacles, great people will find a
way around them. This has held true not just for the participants at
WikiMania, but for the organizers. I am amazed at the efforts,
commitment, and passion of SamuelKlein, PhoebeAyers, DelphineMenard,
and the many, many others who worked ridiculously hard to make this
conference happen. The whole community deserves tremendous praise. I
hope it continues to do what it does well, while unabashedly exploring
ways to improve. (L0M)
One goal that the WikiMania organizers should have for next year is
improving conference Wiki usage among the participants. Effective
self-documentation via Wiki is a staple of BlueOxen's processes, and
we've managed to influence many others about it, including BarCamp and
the Aspiration events. But the best Wiki
usage at an event I've ever seen was at RecentChangesCamp. The
community was already steeped in Wiki culture, and the process
encouraged self-documentation. The fact that neither WikiMania nor
WikiSym has seen effective conference-wide usage of Wikis is an
indicator that something is blocking the community's natural
instincts. It's also a lost opportunity, as those who attend the
conference seeking to learn about Wikis miss out on the chance to
experience them first-hand. (L0N)
Quick Hits (L0O)
- I was amazed at the number of speakers who exclaimed how honored
they were to be there. Some of them were merely experiencing the
euphoria of speaking at a gathering of their peers for the first
time. Others were hardened veterans of the speaking circuit,
including YochaiBenkler and DavidWeinberger. Yochai even
interrupted his traditional two months beach getaway to speak at the
conference. (L0P)
- Speaking of DavidWeinberger, I saw him talk for the first time, and
now I know what the fuss is about. He's a wonderful speaker --
self-deprecating, sharp wit, great sense of humor, and very
thoughtful. He did a MontyPython-like parody of LawrenceLessig's
presentation-style that had the entire audience rolling with
laughter, and he managed to slip in references to Hegel and
Heidegger without sounding pretentious. But I had two beefs with
his talk. (Boy, I'm just Mr. Negativity today.) First, he disputed
the notion that knowledge is just in people's head, citing all the
knowledge associated with the artifacts that surround us. I
understand the point he was trying to make, but I didn't like how he
made it. Artifacts are not knowledge. I generally find myself
taking the exact opposite stance as Weinberger -- emphasizing that
knowledge is in our heads, because it stresses the human element
we so often forget when we think about our relationship to
knowledge. Second, he made a hypothesis about Wikipedia editing
behavior that practically everybody in the room knew was wrong. He
admitted that he was speculating, and gracefully acknowledged his
error when informed of it, but he never should have made that
mistake in the first place. There were many people he could have
simply asked before making such a claim. (L0Q)
- The best talk from someone I had never heard of was by SethAnthony,
who spoke about Wikipedia editing patterns. See RossMayfield's
notes for
a summary. (L0R)
- FernandaViegas and MartinWattenberg, the IBM researchers who created
History
Flow, gave an outstanding talk where they demonstrated some new
visualizations of Wiki usage. Some of those visualizations are
available in my Flickr
collection.
I particularly found their visualizations of user behavior
interesting, because of past
suggestions
that such visualizations could be a powerful way to help casual
readers determine reputations. The biggest obstacle (besides the
computing power required to generate these visualizations)?
Privacy. Even though these visualizations were based on public
data, that does not automatically make it okay to make those
visualizations available. Witness AOL's recent
fiasco (and read TomMaddox's
commentary). (L0S)
- I caught up with DennyVrandecic towards the end of the conference,
and I'm glad I did. He gave me an in-depth demo of
Semantic MediaWiki, which he had first
proposed (but had not coded) at last year's WikiMania. The notion
of encoding link types in Wikis is not new, but up until I saw the
SemanticMediaWiki, the best implementation I had seen was
EvanProdromou's WikiTravel. I think the
SemanticMediaWiki is a better approach. It's less expressive than
WikiTravel, but more likely to be widely adopted. I plan on
experimenting with it and incorporating some of its capabilities
into my own Wikis. (L0T)
/events |
Posted at 1:33am
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