University of Canberra/RCC2011/RecentChangesCamp Expanded/San Francisco

Organizing on a MeetingWords Etherpad

Calling it RCCx - which is nice :-)

Also, see: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Wiki_meetup (possible SF venue)

RCCx San Francisco, February 2011

RCCx (RecentChangesCamp eXpanded) events are in addition to full-scale RecentChangesCamp events, and include smaller meetups or other wiki get-togethers.

rccx-sf 2011-02-01 raw notes venue: noisebridge sf

Attendees

• Mark Dilley
• Pete F
• Brion
• Stephen
• Peter Kaminski - kaminski@istori.com
• eekim
• Kaliya
• Joe
• Arlen Abraham - localwiki board member
• Paul -- Internet Archive, FSF connections. OpenLibrary.org

RecentChangesCamp 2011, Canberra Update

Mark's first Open Space facilitation. He found people very interested in discussing wiki culture.

• Wikimedia is the big gorilla of wiki culture.
• Wikimedia Australia chapter was able to get lots of people there. UCNISS was also able to get a fair amount of people there because we utilized our local networks including educators.
• Facilitation this time may have been better than the first RCC Australia, led to richer outcome
  • Reminisces of Wikipedia 10, which was well-facilitated by eekim (and also, kickoff by wardc was a great focusing)
• session: "why wikis don't work"
• Brion says MediaWiki installer is getting better! (yay)
• Interesting discussion of WikiTravel: a site that was bought by an absentee company. They don't interfere, but they don't upgrade either!
• Lonely Planet publisher is doing a cool OpenOffice/MediaWiki mashup
• A lot of wikispaces users attended
• white walls are fantastic for this type of event

RCC wiki problems -> Wikiversity

Future Stuff

• How does the Australian RCC community plug in and work with the RCC community in the USA? Australian perspective is a bit of "ignore the Americans" as the Americans are ignoring us. The American in Australian is just RAR! WE ARE AWESOME! we listen to you! Why no return favor? (Also, desire to get Mark out for New Zealand three day some time in 2012.)
  • discussion: maybe RCC USA is not as organized as we seem :-) maybe we're not ignoring, we're just stumbling around
  • maybe wikimedia vs. rcc issue?
    • Possibly? Could be non-profit/educator vs WMF & commercial wiki communities?
  • larger question: what about the wiki ecosystem as a whole
  • kaliya shares story about IIW -- see section below
• I think having a, you know, wiki will help (you know, one you can edit ;)
  • Seriously: Issue for me. RCC in Australia and New Zealand have the advantage of being a bit more topical. And they are a lot more WMF and educator centric than the ones in the USA. We also like the idea of doing one day RCCs. I've yet to be able to feel out how others feel about that.
  • This 'topical' RCC was also a factor for Wikimedia Australia; I doubt the WMAu board would have agreed to get behind the RCC if it didnt have some credibility in that lots of people engaged in the (real) education sector had attended the one-day RCC last year.
• And yes, the wiki being functional would be good. I think its failure to work is going to push the RCC community in Australia to be more focused on Wikiversity. (Probably as part of a grand experiment to see if Wikiversity can work.)

Forking

• discussion about wikitravel fork discussion
  • There was some discussion of forking wikiTravel. Or maybe WikiVoyage.org wants to take add the other languages they didnt fork originally.
• has there ever been a successful fork of a wiki community?
• wired article about Spanish Wikipedia Fork
  • http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/20/wikipedia-spanish-fork
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-01-24/In_the_news
  • Essay on the Spanish fork: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Transwiki:Wikimania05/Paper-AS1
• Polish Wikipedia did too, smaller
• both re-merged later
• John Vandenberg (rocks) and Mark are going to discuss the idea of forking communities over on Meatball, in a general way
• citizendium
• wikia? conservapedia?
• somebody should make a wiki family tree! Would this be possible on wikindex?
  • Where the inspiration came from for each? Would be fun.
    • the inspiration came from beer (there was some cider involved too).

• Other recent Open Source forks: LibreOffice (from OpenOffice), MariaDB (from MySQL)

Jyte -- JanRain -- AboutUs

• note the difference between forking an entire dataset+community and diverting particular sub-areas out of a larger community to a smaller one -- can be related though, and there may be a fuzzy boundary
  • citizendium -- can this be considered a fork? same _content_ goals as wikipedia, but "forking" the creation process itself
  • define successful? A few of the clones/forks/spawns were moderately successful, but one key element (for me) is whether the fork can replace the original. Google Juice is one of the problems that a fork has to contend with : how does a new wiki compete with the old one which has millions of incoming links and a network of 'follow' links that Google loves.
  • many wikitravel, wikia communities (as well as the non-wikipedia WMF projects) started at least in part by diverting people interested in doing certain kinds of things from wikipedia to their own smaller projects
  • define fork? I consider Fan History a Wikipedia fork. We have no content that we really borrowed from there but we left Wikipedia because it did not work with our goals. It was an intentional response to Wikipedia.
  • also consider cases where a community leaves their content behind and has to recreate it elsewhere due to licensing or other lockdown issues

family tree

nice idea from Kaliya - a family tree/visualization of how wikis have evolved, on three dimensions:

• wiki family/people
• content
• software

Internet Identity Wolkshop

Kaliya brings this up as a different community dealing with international issues.

• iiw.idcommons.net

Blogs

How can we get better blogging about how to use wikis?

Can/should wiki communities use blogging and social networking in more integrated ways? What does it change about the community when people communicate outside the wiki? (cf existing mailing lists, irc chat) Does this need to be more two-way, or is that already the case?

Keeping track of published research about what sort of interventions make wiki communities/online communities work best

• • Wikihow did research. Where is that?

WikiOhana

How to generate more WikiOhana?

• group blog
• signpost
• wikiplanet
• #wikipintouch
• "energy of the we"
  • part of why we like wiki is because we can participate when we have energy, and not when we don't
• Conference sponsorship from wiki companies (good faith participation in wider community, encouraging their members to engage)

WikiFactor

[Soft ways of directing traffic & activity to interesting things]

Automated activity-detection for promotion of cool stuff? "This page is now at wiki factor 8, come check it out!"

Universal Edit Button

• Help file built in, that explains syntax for whatever software you're in?

She's Geeky

• Kaliya reports…they just had their 4th bay area one
• a lot of women doing amazing stuff -- but mostly they want to do their own stuff
• How do large institutions (e.g., Anita Borg Institute, Wikimedia, ...) relate to grassroots organizations in the same space in a healthy way, without "pretending" they're on the same level?
  • e.g., keep a community database of grassroots orgs, so people (and they) can find each other

We want MetaOrganizing

• Larger organizations should play a role in helping smaller orgs be networked
• Wiki Planet
• Wiki weblog?
• What is the role of Wikimedia Foundation to do meta-organizing?
• Is this a role for Wikimedia member organizations?
• Pete K feels it's important for the Foundation to be more "conscious" of interfacing with grassroots, non-Wikimedia wiki communities.
  • Some interesting thoughts about how this needs to work; problems vs benefits of having explicit interfaces.
    • If someone comes and asks for something to be done, sometimes the right answer is "no we're not going to do it -- but YOU can!" If nobody actually says it, then the interested party might never do it. There's as much value in saying "go ahead" as there is in actually being able to do it for someone.

Membership organizations

Would some of the issues we're discussing be better served in the U.S. by a membership organization (like Wikimedia chapters)? Is there a possible U.S. Wikimedia chapter?

• There have been a number of discussions about a U.S. chapter.
• There's a Wikimedia New York City
• There have been rumblings about Washington DC, California, and Oregon

• Eugene: Is what we need "another organization" or is it simply "more organizing" irrespective of what the specific orgs are?
  • Piggyback on Canada?
    • Not as useful as a geographically overlapping chapter with seperate leadership for the reasons in http://talknicer.com/wm10ca.pdf
  • Advantage of chapters is money (it's easier to do fundraising with the Wikimedia brand than without) Money can help with organizing. Other advantage is credibility. RCC Canberra had more credibility because of ties to UCNISS and Wikimedia Australia. Wikiversity might have more credibility down here if it looked like we had WMF support.

• Would it be worthwhile to have a "wiki" foundation apart from WMF?
  • WMF exists to "protect" the content/servers, at the expense of volunteers to some extent
  • i.e. they avoid legal battles that involve volunteers, or it appears that way. A member-based organisation, which doesnt 'own' the servers, can have more focus on the community's needs. A US member based organisation would have clout (money, resources, etc) in court, and could also provide (real) dispute resolution services for issues which involve people within its member base and member vs non-member. services such as teleconferencing and engaging professional mediators.
    • US organization doing that might not be viewed favorably internationally as it could be seen as another attempt by Americans to impose their will on the world. This is problem enough on Wikipedia.
• What's the one thing we all could do, or have other people do, that would help?
• Agile Manifesto is an example (link?)
  • Some reflection on 10 years of the manifesto: http://www.pragprog.com/magazines/2011-02/agile--

• you've got to accentu-ate the positive!

discussions tend to focus on things that don't work; sometimes necessary to keep perspective

RecentChangesCamp Canberra worked. :D Lots of positives coming out of it. We might have two to four wiki conferences come out of it. And we learned more about our own needs, how Wikimedia Australia can help us grow our national community, its mission, made contacts that we can use. We have less Wikiversity angst and think it could be more useful. (Lack of venue and funding issues probably helped made the experience a lot more positive than we have had in the USA and Canada.)

Community-Forming For Wiki

• necessary components
  • networking
  • group identity
  • activation energy
• what's one thing we can do now?
• Wiki brand, wiki foundation
• Agile Manifesto - ?? Wiki Manifesto
• ward as spiritual leader
  • ask ward to come up with 5 or so core principles of WikiOhana
    • Ward needs more of an explanation. I don't know how well known Ward is. Leigh had no idea and wondered why you needed him to help establish credibility.
• challenge statement: getting people who are clearly part of the wiki community to say "us" instead of "you guys"
• a role for invitation? make people feel welcome, and make sure they know they'll be welcome with 'us' as well as off by themselves "let's go to the party together" not "hey come to MY party"
  • invitation -> WelcomeVisitors (see Welcoming section below)

to look up

• http://OpenLibrary.org - a wiki page for every book
• http://wikisource.org - a wiki page for every PD page :P

There are pretty excellent connections betw. Wikisource, Openlibrary.org, and archive.org -- DJVU files from archive -> wikisource and OL.org… wikisource heavily links to archive.org - I think we would also heavily link to openlibrary.org but there hasnt been much call for this, esp. as openlibrary has been a bit fluid while they work out their automatic importing system (which is stablising) John, remind me to tell you about an idea IA has about linking to wikisource sounds good - if we dont get time now, we can take it offline via email or my talk page on en.ws Sure!

Welcoming

Invitation (study on this done by WikiHow) -is there a power relationship with invitation

Not "come to my party" but "let's go to this fun party together"

Make event wikis more party like. Laura loves RCC Canberra wiki because it is so fun with animated gifs.

rcc-announcement list needed

• now set up: http://groups.google.com/group/rcc-announcements
• Announcement list for one day, expanded and events around the world? (yes)

PREVIOUS CONTENT FROM EVENT SETUP

Confirmed Event

Tuesday, February 1, 6:00pm at Noisebridge: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Wiki_meetup

Please consider donating a few $ to this community-run hacker space when you attend!

Proposed Dates

• Tuesday, February 1
• Wednesday, February 2
• Thursday, February 3 (morning)

Other Potential Venues

Hub SF HealthRally (SF) Palo Alto (SocialText? Methean?) Mountain View (Hacker Dojo?) Anywhere near Fremont?

Attendees

(please list any venue or date/time preferences)

Peter Kaminski - Tuesday evening at Noisebridge MarkDilley - where/whenever - http://MeetingWords.com/MarkDilley Geoff Dale - maybe (prefer Palo Alto, since I am rarely getting too far from home base these days. At least during extended biz hours.) Pete F. http://peteforsyth.com Definitely in SF; would like to attend in Palo Alto, but would need a ride Eugene - Tuesday

Resources

• wiki-sf-bay-area mailing list
• Wikimedia Bay Area mailing list

Stuff to talk about

• RecentChangesCamp Canberra
• WikiCreole (common themes in wiki syntax from one wiki engine to another)
• Gender and Wikipedia
• wiki spam

…

Update RecentChangesCamp Wiki

• When ready - http://RecentChangesCamp.org/wiki/RecentChangesCamp_Expanded (problems with spam prevent editing rrc.org)

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/University_of_Canberra/RCC2011/RecentChangesCamp_Expanded

• Link this from main page/template at RCC wiki?