Wikimania 2006/Website/Main Page/Call for Participation

Call for Participation

We are accepting submissions for papers, posters, presentations, workshops, and discussion groups. We are also accepting nominations for speakers and speaker panels, and suggestions for other activities. Everyone is welcome to submit abstracts and ideas. Be bold in your submissions!

Submissions should address one or more of the themes listed below. The deadline for submitting an abstract is 15 April 2006. Accepted authors will be notified by 15 May 2006.

Conference Themes

Technical infrastructure – Issues related to Mediawiki development and extensions; Wikimedia hardware layout; new ideas for development (case studies from other wikis or similar projects)

Wikimedia projects and content – Presentation of interesting projects and results; future project aims, types of distribution. Ways to improve content quality. New uses for project content: in education, journalism, research, &c.

Free knowledge and access to information – Present and future free knowledge initiatives; goals of librarians and archivists around the world; ways to gather and distribute knowledge

Wiki sociology – The contributors and users (who are they? Where do they come from?), reputation and identity issues, conflict resolution and community dynamics; scaling digital communities; languages and cultures and their interactions online; multilingualism via wikis

Law and Policy - Copyleft, collective copyright, special issues pertaining to communal editing and distribution; other legal areas for which Wiki[mp]edia is an interesting case study. Policy creation within individual projects

Submissions

Types of Submissions

Panels (Suggest a group of 2-5 speakers on a specific subject)
Workshops (From 30-120 minutes)
Presentations (10-30 minute presentations/papers)
Posters (Printed presentations or visual displays that can stand on their own)
BOFs (Birds-of-a-Feather/discussion sessions - 45-60 minutes of group discussion)

We are also accepting artistic submissions, especially visualizations or other representations of some aspect of the projects.

Submission format

All submissions should include a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words. They should also list the full name (and wiki name if appropriate) of the submitter, with contact information and affiliations. Special requirements for the presentation (equipment for a workshop or panel) should be noted. The abstracts should be provided as plain text, and not as file attachments.

Workshop submissions should include a 1-2pp overview of the areas to be covered or taught.

Speaker panel submissions should include short biographies of each suggested panelist.

Paper and Presentation submissions may include a link to a draft of the paper or slides, if available. State clearly whether the submission concerns a specific wiki project, and whether the presentation is intended to be a specific length.

BOF proposals should describe the significance of and community interest in the topic, and name the proposed discussion leader(s).

Each submission must be licensed under a free content license (GFDL, CC-BY-SA…). In addition to formatted final papers, posters, and slides, you should submit a plain text and also in an open format (OpenOffice, LaTeX sources, HTML…).

To process your submission, please see the Wikimania website. Send questions or suggestions to wikimania-cfp <at> wikimedia.org .

Important dates

30 Mar 2006 : Proposal deadline for workshops and tutorials (Notification of acceptance: by April 30)
15 Apr 2006 : Abstracts due for panels, papers, posters and presentations (Notification of acceptance: by May 15)
15 Jun 2006 : Final copy/images of research papers, posters, and slides
4-6 Aug 2006 : Wikimania