Talk:Wikimania 2006 Call for Participation

Program software and how to submit

Right now the line about how to submit directs people to the old CfP page on wikimania.wikimedia.org.

And http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_participation shows an error message (you have to login) -- Nichtich 10:46, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

We need to update that page with clear submission instructions. A promising option is to use Indico (test installation) to process papers and scheduling, and to ask people to submit by registering with an Indico install. We could clear out the test site, customize its appearance, and redirect a subdomain of wikimania.org to it. We need to decide in the next few days what the CfP should say; please test out the site and comment on the software below. Sj 05:04, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Comments on Indico

• How easy is it to replace the logo? Sj
• How long does it take to sign in and submit an abstract? Sj

  You have to verify your email; then it takes another 3 minutes or so.

Lists

Lists of people and lists who should receive the CfP:

Moved to Wikimania 2006 Call for Participation/Distribution list

Dates

• Submission software dusted off: 2006-01-30
• CfP sent out by 2006-02-01
• Theme organization set up: 2006-02-15

No attachments

I suggest changing "Every submission material must be provided in an open format" to "Every submission material must be provided in plain text". Since these will be sent to OTRS which has no virus checking, opening attachments there is a bad idea. It would be much easier, especially since these need to be wikified at some point, if we refused to take sumissions with attachments. Angela 00:39, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

• Have we addressed this now? Abstract submissions are plain text and there is a separate paragraph for "final" submissions. Only accepted submissions will get to the "final" stage, so, it should be more manageable.) --AlexanderWait 16:51, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Themes

minor comments & addenda to 'themes' section: Under "Wikimedia projects and content", I would say not just future project aims (like future plans), but also the future of the projects (like sustainability & scaling & the like). Maybe just say 'the future of the projects, types of distribution.'?

Under "Free knowledge," I don't like "goals of librarians and archivists around the world" -- maybe 'relationship with librarianship and archiving'? 'related library and archival projects'? 'input from librarians and archivists around the world'? I am drawing a blank on how to say this better. I mean, you don't just want some random librarian talking about libraries, but rather how library or specific library-project goals relate to wikimedia goals, or how librarians can help the project/we can help librarians, yes?

Periods: I would like to add some periods to the end of the conference theme sentences. Objections?

I like everything else about the cfp. Brassratgirl 03:12, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Older theme ideas

Some quick ideas, many from last year:

• the individual Wikimedia projects
• free licensing and free knowledge (legal, social, business aspects)
• multilingualism, translation, and global community networks (erasing the "150 person" barrier, &c)
• getting information (digitally or in print) to the developing world
• technical infrastructure (wikis and related software; serving a billion pageviews a day; hardware; robustness and distributed systems)

Other tracks suggested so far have included:

• Science, Library stuff, Information science/tech, Medicine, Education, JT's paper, Wikis in business (from the Boston Wikipedia Meetup Group)
• legal, developers, social, users, projects (from Nov.19 IRC meeting)
• Reputation/identity issues in Wikipedia (Nov.19 IRC meeting)
• future interfaces to wikis (Nov.19 IRC meeting)
• wikis/wiki engines other than wikipedia/mediawiki (comparisons?) ( Nov.19 IRC meeting)
• how wikis are being used/developed elsewhere, generally (Nov.19 IRC meeting)
• Wiki Research (Academic Research about and with wikis, the future, social,...)
• Wikis in teaching / Wikiversity / Wikisophia
• Public local chapters session (not sure if this is a "track" - might fit in with an internationalism track)

Key topics from 2005-11-23

• _sj_ - multilingualism, projects and content, sociology and community, tech, relationship with other projects/orgs
• cormaggio - education, multilingualism, international/national issues (ie local chapters), project sociology
• await - Free Knowledge, multiligunalism, wiki journalism
• nichtich - techical stuff, community stuff, new/interesting wik[mp]edia projects, politics and related projects

More details

• Local chapters - International/national issues
• Multilingualism: How can wikis help to bridge the subtle culture gaps across languages? How do other international bodies cope with language diversity? What linguistics uses are there for Wikimedia's multilingual corpus? How should we handle minority languages?
• Free knowledge: How far are we from a world of free scientific journals? What can be done to get more existing knowledge under a free license? How can we help to preserve and distribute this knowledge, and provide universal access to it?
• Wiki sociology: What motivates Wikimedians and what drives them away? Who are they, anyway? And where do they come from? How do wikis build Community?
• Wiki project/content ideas: Which successful projects in your Wikimedia project exist that other languages and projects don't know about? What new projects may we want to start? How could content be distributed to places that do not have Internet access? What other content creators could we cooperate with?

Sponsorships/accommodation for speakers

We have to design (not here) but we really have to do it, a frame for possible sponsorship for speakers so that we know *what* is available in this field BEFORE we accept the paper. Accepting a paper from someone who can't travel and whom we can't fund is a bummer, imho. So a "sponsorship" frame whatever needs to be thought up. notafish }<';> 01:35, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed; something to inform every theme's decisions, and interactions with potential speakers. Sj 18:56, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

We could include language in the CFP like: "A limited number of stipends will be available to those unable to obtain funding to attend the conference. Students whose talks are accepted and who will present themselves are encouraged to apply if assistance is needed. Requests for stipends should be addressed to the general wikimania-info mailing list."

Paraphrased from http://www.iacr.org/conferences/crypto2006/cfp.html

paraphrase by Sj 00:40, 31 January 2006 (UTC), original post by ??

I amended this to say: "A limited number of stipends will be available to those unable to obtain funding to attend the conference. Accepted presenters are encouraged to apply if assistance is needed." ..and added it to the CFP. Took out "students" because what about non-students from places we want represented? Brassratgirl 04:43, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Note to accepted presenters

In addition to formatted final papers, posters, and slides (in an open format, please: OpenOffice, LaTeX sources, HTML…). , you should submit a plain text version (summary or fulltext) for inclusion on the conference wiki.

Do we want to require anything in the way of licensing? What kinds of releases should we ask? Most conferences ask quite restrictive things of presenters; we could at least ask for the right to display their content indefinitely on the wikimania site. Sj 01:39, 30 January 2006 (UTC)ß

A Free license is a must in my humble opinion. I changed the CfP text. -- Nichtich 10:46, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Status of distribution/translation

I came from Wikimania Main page. Has CfP already done and already distributed? (And I find no fault but surely improvement might always be welcome) If it's already written up, then we are better to translate/distribute it, on my preferences if early till the end of this month, if late within the first 10 days of March. Any information and suggestion? --Aphaia 08:22, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, it's translated in thé most important world languages :) (atm Spanish, Italian and Dutch) /me is poking the french, german, polish, serbian, russian, swedish, simple, chinese, japanese, greek, latin, turkish, arabic, persian, swahili, klingon and all the other languages...

Effeietsanders 09:34, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I polished up the Italian translation and noticed that there are no requirements about accepted languages for the proposals. Shall we specify English only? --Lp 13:35, 23 March 2006 (UTC)