Grants:TPS/Oren Bochman/WikiSym 2013/Report

Event name:WikiSym

Description of your participation: My participation at WikiSym allowed me to get in touch with several groups of people at wiki sym number of researchers and instructors including:

Education Related

Dr Michele Notari with PHBern and University of Hong Kong, Robert P. Niuk-Aghai, with the university of Macau, Long time wikipedian Piotr Konieczny from Hanyang University who are active with wikipedia related education.

Dr Michele Notari and Robert P. Niuk-Aghai have both used modified private wikis for instruction of student. Notari presented a paper covering this work with very similar ideas to my own. I have to admit that his work is more focused and complete but takes a complementary look at the use of metrics to drive results in wikipedia based education. I am more interested in balancing interests of the three key players while Notari as an educator was more interested in the insruction. However his research also covers the students learning experience in different disciples. We discussed the possibility of cooperation once his student have completed the different projects, and once my tools become mature for public consumption.

I also better understand design for formative assessment and to what degree student, teachers, support staff and wikipedians expect to get out of wikipedia editing assignments. I found out that communication on wikis is a major problem for students and that their work is limited to about 10 hours of editing most of which may be done offline.

I also connected with another group of wikipedia based educators at the pre conference on education. I have used these connections to create a facebook group called the Wikipedia Educator's think tank in which we exchange ideas.

Game theory interests in OSS

I also met with Shane Coughlan, the Global Director of Licensing at Open Invention Network and previously with the electronic frontier foundation. As well as his the and his colleague Fukkuma Kana who presented on open data. Shane Coughlan was more interested in my prior work on game theoretic analysis of CSCW systems. It turns out that more and more contributors to large open source projects are paid by third parties and we are interested in investigating to what extent this affects the participation of volunteers. This type of work is strategically significant to understand possible endgames of wikipedia type projects.

What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events?

• Book hotels well in advance - I could not get a hotel in the neighbourhood and this made logitics very difficult.
• Read up on papers from previous years.
• Talk to many different people - you will be surprised on how many different areas they have worked on and tou will quickly discover that you have many shared interests in common.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation? I think I made a strong case for moving from private wikis to WMF wikis. Particularly in the case of translation based assignments. I hope to be taking these insights with me as I develop a mooc for wikipedia based adoption and for editing assignments in the coming year.

Logistics

Detail of expenditures:

• Air Travel  : USD 166
• Accommodation  : USD 283
• Event Registration : USD 220
• Meals and incidental expenses: USD 312

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency):