Grants:TPS/Sky Harbor/Open Source Bridge 2014

User name
Sky Harbor
User location (country)
Philippines
Event name
Open Source Bridge 2014
Event Web site
http://www.opensourcebridge.org
Event date(s)
June 24-27, 2014
Event location (city)
Portland, Oregon, United States
Amount requested (remember to specify currency!)
USD 1980 (advance disbursement requested, though see the note below)
Endorsements

Budget breakdown

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  • Travel: USD 1700
    • This is for a round-trip economy class ticket from Manila (MNL) to Portland (PDX) and back.
  • Accommodation: USD 280
    • This presumes an average of USD 70 per night for four nights (from June 23-27, the duration of the conference). This may change depending on actual arrangements, and the final figure may be lower than this estimate.

Although I requested for advance disbursement, it would be helpful if I could arrange my travel through the Wikimedia Foundation directly, should this arrangement be possible.

Proposed Participation

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My participation at Open Source Bridge 2014 involves giving a presentation entitled "The Promise of Collaborative Magic", an expanded version of my submission proposal for Wikimania 2014 entitled "The (Broken?) Promise of Wikimagic: The Life, Death and Rebirth of Boldness and Constructive Collaboration on Wikipedia". In this session, I hope to bring together different communities to discuss on how they deal with the idea of a “magic” collaborative ethos, how we can continue to foster an environment of constructive collaboration and to prevent sending signals to users that their work is of lesser value, and whether the solution to reinforcing this ethos of collaboration is dependent on the creation of structures or on the redefinition of our values as open-source communities. Both this presentation and the submission for Wikimania 2014 will explain how the Wikimedia movement has dealt with this phenomenon and whether or not the promise that we send to editors (that there is someone out there who will help you with your Wikipedia work) is necessarily true to begin with.

To highlight my experience with respect to preparing this presentation, I have been an active Wikipedian since April 2005, mostly editing about articles related to the Philippines. I am also involved in the local open-source community at large, having been one of the founders of Wikimedia Philippines, the Philippine Wikimedia chapter. Since around late 2010, when I was a sophomore at the Ateneo de Manila University taking up political science, I have taken an interest in analyzing the system of social relations on Wikipedia—a topic which still fascinates me today—and have produced academic work to that effect (the immediate effort from that interest is an essay called "The Wikipedian Condition", which is a submission I presented at Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong). My continued interest in social relations and Wikipedia has made it (Wikipedia) a focal point of my own academic endeavors, to the extent that I have decided to continue writing about open-source (and Wikipedia) in subsequent academic work, and also in post-academic work, including this presentation.

This will be my second time presenting at Open Source Bridge, so I look forward to continuing to not just learn from the conference (as I did last year), but also to share best practices and stories about how collaboration works between different groups, whether that be individually or when working together.

Goal and Expected Impact

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As a result of my presentation, it is my hope that I will be able to make participants aware as to how Wikipedia deals with the idea of 'collaborative magic', in particular how this relates to some of our core movement values (such as boldness, assuming good faith and not biting the newcomers), and whether there is something that we can learn from other communities. Given the increasing urgency of needing to deal with editor decline on Wikipedia, some outside perspectives on how we can fix cultural issues within the movement would be helpful in determining the right course of action, and I look forward to presenting those outcomes at Wikimania should my submission be accepted, and broadly speaking on Wikipedia.

In addition, I also hope to bring back to the Philippines new ideas and perspectives as to how we can make the open-source movement more effective here at home.