Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

WikiSym 2010 website
July 7-8-9 in Gdansk, Poland.

Co-located with Wikimania 2010 (Intl. Conference on Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimania 2010 website).

Peer-reviewed and archived in the ACM Digital Library.

Important dates

1. March 7: Submission deadline for research papers.
2. March 21: Submission deadline for Doctoral Symposium proposals, posters, demonstrations, workshops, panels, tutorials.
3. May 4: Notification of acceptance for research papers.
4. May 11: Notification of acceptance for Doctoral Symposium proposals, posters, workshops, tutorials, panels.
5. July 7-9: WikiSym 2010!

Summary
WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, will be held this summer in Gdansk, Poland. Starting this year, WikiSym aims to explicitly broaden its scope, exploring not only the thriving wiki community, but also other open movements and open collaboration initiatives. This includes related areas such as open online communities, collaborative creation of multimedia content (with or without wikis), and open journalism and publishing, just to list a few examples.

Furthermore, our goal is to establish WikiSym as a venue for the exchange of information, experiences and practices among an interdisciplinary audience, including researchers, practitioners, industry representatives and experts with a wide variety of different backgrounds.

As a result, WikiSym has established 3 complementary tracks to merge the contributions from such a diverse community:

Wiki track: Focused on research in wiki technology, wiki websites, wiki communities, and in general any kind of initiative pivoting around wiki software.

Industry track:This new track will focus on the specific needs of enterprises and private companies interested in sharing and promoting their experiences around wikis and open collaboration projects/products/initiatives.

Open collaboration track: This track is a dedicated venue for sharing research results and experiences in initiatives that may not be built specifically on wiki software, but share the “wiki way” of organization. These may include open collaborations, open communities, and open movements that allow the interchange of ideas and contributions from participants with a range of interests and motivations.

Read the rest of the entry at the WikiSym 2010 Website

For the past two years I have held positions at WikiSym. From Demos and Posters Chair in 2008, Publicity Chair in 2009, this year I am Industry Track Chair, focusing “on the specific needs of enterprises and private companies interested in sharing and promoting their experiences around wikis and open collaboration projects/products/initiatives.”

Unlike the call for papers, which follows academic procedures, the Industry Track takes it’s own course. I’ll be inviting a myriad of vendors to suggest topics, bring customers and participate on panels and round-tables.

However, in the spirit of open collaboration, the more help I can get the bigger and better we can make the WikiSym 2010 Industry Track. I’ve presently a great deal of work on and I’d appreciate being able to depend on a team around me.

So, there you go, a call for papers, industry topics and help. Come to WikiSym: it’s a great mixing pot.

Hi all - can you forward this through your networks?

Any Beatles older fans (40s, 50s, 60s) so excited about The Beatles: Rock Band that will start gaming for the first time because of its release?

In case you don’t know:

Rock Band is a console video game that allows up to four players to play popular rock music songs using with controllers modeled after musical instruments. Players can play the lead guitar, bass guitar, and drums parts or sing through a USBmicrophone. The game scores the players based on accuracy to match scrolling musical “notes” while playing instruments, or by the singer’s ability to match pitch on vocals.

It’s great fun, and you can buy it for home or play Rock Band in social settings such as at http://www.semisolidmedia.com - which runs a Rock Band night at Rocky Raccoons in Yonge & Eglinton here in Toronto, first Sat of each month.

Anyhow, the game makers have just released a new edition that instead of playing recent songs focuses on the Beatles songs. With this (new/old!) focus, so might come new demand.

I’m forwarding this request as I think it is a good example of how technology is changing society, and I hope someone here might be able to provide an interview for the Globe & Mail.

Please respond to Dakshana directly, thanks!

Thanks!

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Bascaramurty, Dakshana wrote:

Via Paul Hunter, NextGen Player, Canada’s Premier Gaming Blog), forwarded to me through Eric Brazier (http://www.semisolidmedia.com)

Don’t know if you remember me — I got in touch a few months back for a story I was working on about diversity in gaming.

I’m working on another piece now about how The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen are out to appeal to older gamers or perhaps even introduce older people to gaming for the first time. Is this something you think you’d have some time and expertise to talk to me about? Also, if you know any older people who were maybe Beatles or Van Halen fans a few decades ago that are excited about the release of these games, think you could put me in touch with them?

By older fans (I’m taking 40s, 50s, 60s), who you know of that are excited about The Beatles: Rock Band and maybe wading into gaming for the first time because of its release?”
Thanks so much!

Dakshana Bascaramurty
Reporter, The Globe and Mail
Desk: 416-585-5509

Cross posting here in case someone at MacSpeech deletes my non-fan comment on their Facebook fan page:

My opinion?

Not exciting. Overpriced. Broken.

I am livid that Macspeech Dictate 1.3 is broken beyond usability, that it would cost me so much to buy and ship 1.5 to Canada, and that even 1.5 is reported to be so broken.

Injury to ship beta software. Insult to demand so much for an “upgrade” that still doesn’t work. I bought in January, but the free upgrade is only if you bought in the last month…

I was looking forward to unshelving it. Looks like ebay with caveat emptor is my only option.

To which I reply:

Thanks Ray. I am glad it works for you.

Did you read http://www.macspeech.com/extensions/forums/topic.php?id=323 “Pay an upgrade fee to get the software to work?”

Have you never had it write backward in the dictate notepad? http://www.macspeech.com/extensions/search/search.php?search=backwards…

The technology is cool, but definitely beta quality.

Granted, if your typing is poor, it offers value. But if, like me you can type quickly, it needs a usability hike to make it usable.

1.3 and 1.5 are reported to not even work in MacOS 1.5.7.

They’ve produced 1.5.1 since 1.5. So where is 1.3.1?

Let’s do the math. I paid ~$200 for it. Upgrade is $54.95 USD, shipping to Canada: $31.06 FedEx. USD Total: 86.01 Convert to CAD: $93.77. Now add expected FedEx brokerage fee: $20. Total: 113.77

So, the beta quality software I have is worth $200-114 = $86.

Except that it doesn’t work in 10.5.7, and there is no upgrade path. So, what’s it worth?

Net loss: $200.

The protests on the MacSpeech forums are loud and clear. I sure hope MacSpeech will start listening.

What an un-Apple like experience.

I can understand charging an upgrade fee for software, but only once your product works. And MacSpeech say that they don’t do digital downloads because 1.5GB download is “too big”.

Shelfware. Sadly.

Each of these episodes explored a swathe of gaps, which after debate, workers, industry leaders, government drew some conclusions about issues. The issues and opportunities that arose are documented on http://wiki.theagenda.tvo.org/ and there are some 45 short videos from each breakout session listed on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1341CA7B9BA9C666

TVO presented at http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/

I’ve you’ve been thinking about evaluating, or using Confluence or JIRA for a small team, now would be a great time to acquire a license.

Atlassian, a leader vendor (I have done many wiki deployments of Confluence: it’s a solid product), is offering a new multi-user license of their flagship product for just $5. Further, this price will apply to support and maintenance. The offer expires in five days!

If you need advice on how Confluence stacks up strategically or technically against competitor wiki products, I’ll happily spend a few minutes with you explaining.

I hope this helps, I think it’s a great deal.

Best, Martin Cleaver
Skype: mrjcleaver
416-786-6752
http://www.blendedperspectives.com/

JIRA & Confluence for only $5 each!

While you may still be evaluating an Atlassian product, we have a special announcement. This week, we’re offering 5-user licenses of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. We’re calling it the Atlassian Stimulus Package and it’s our way of supporting small teams and small businesses in this difficult economic environment. Best of all, we’re going to donate every penny to charity!

There is no catch and no strings attached. You’ll get fully functional, supported copies of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. After a year, you can renew support and maintenance of your license for just $5.

The Atlassian Foundation is donating all proceeds to Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org), a charity that helps the world’s future entrepreneurs by building libraries and schools for children in developing nations.

Get all the details at www.atlassian.com/starter. Hurry, offer ends in just a few days!

Cheers,

The Atlassians

PS Twitter this http://bit.ly/AtlassianStarter and tell a friend about the starter licenses — they’re great for small teams and help charity.

–
Martin Cleaver MSc MBA
http://twitter.com/mrjcleaver
+1 416-786-6752 (GMT-5)

I received this a few hours ago from my ISP, Teksavvy.

I object that:

1. If there was really a scarcity tariffs should be priced at decreasing marginal rate, not at a punitive one
2. This affects everyone but the deadline is tonight, and there’s been no public consultation

Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to you today as many activities are underway to shape/reshape Internet use as you all know it. Over the last year some of you have been made aware and/or have seen activities on throttling in the news or in your daily lives. Another proceeding relating to the Internet in Canada required Telecom providers (Bell/Telus/etc.) to provide ISPs with wholesale service speeds that match those that they offer to their own retail customers.

Specifically, Bell has been directed by the CRTC to provide matching speeds which would allow us all to have more flexibility in our day to day online requirements. Instead of adhering to these directives, Bell decided to take this issue to the federal Cabinet and at the same time file a tariff application with the CRTC proposing to introduce Usage Based Billing (UBB) on its wholesale customer accounts.

What does this mean for you, the consumer?

Bell provides TekSavvy with last mile, wholesale DSL access services, which TekSavvy uses to provide you with your Internet access. If Bell were to be allowed to introduce UBB on this service, a cap of 60GB would be imposed on all of its users, with very heavy penalties per Gigabyte afterwards (multiple times more than our current per Gigabyte rate of $0.25/GB on overages). This would inherently all but remove Unlimited internet services in Ontario/Quebec and potentially cause large increases in internet costs
from month to month.

If you’d like to make your comments/concerns known about what Bell is attempting to do, please do so here:

http://support.crtc.gc.ca/crtcsubmissionmu/forms/Telecom.aspx?lang=e

Select the word “Tariff” from the drop down list.

Add the following in Subject Line “File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 - Bell Canada - TN 7181″ and make your thoughts known!

The deadline for filing your comments is today at midnight, so hurry!

Regards,

Rocky

Rocky Gaudrault
Chief Executive Officer
TekSavvy Solutions Inc.

It’s Toronto Wiki Tuesday time!

Reserve you spot & get on the announcements list: http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/

Speaker: Keith Robinson
This month’s speaker is from TV Ontario and will speak about the use of wikis for TVO’s The Agenda

When and Where:
6:30pm, Tuesday 16th April
See http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/ for location

Synopsis

The idea behind the AgendaCamp (http://tvo.org/agendacamp) concept was to marry the barcamp (http://barcamp.org) model with the production of a live current affairs television program in order to engage the community to help create television as the Agenda with Steve Paikin went on a five city tour across Ontario.

AgendaCamp is a unique new concept that marries the best aspects of public broadcasting and emerging social media. At AgendaCamp members of the public, expert guests, and host Steve Paikin join together face to face in a local venue for a series of workshops focused on regional economies. Any participant can propose and lead a discussion. Participants capture the event by live blogging, shooting video and uploading to Youtube, taking pictures and creating an interactive wiki. The online audience can follow the conference as it unfolds, and continue the discussion after the event.

Despite the high tech veneer, AgendaCamp is not simply about preaching to the converted. Several locations were remote in communities (including AgendaCamp Thunder Bay which took place at the Fort William First Nation Community Centre). A big part of the experience is teaching ordinary citizens how to use these new digital tools.

Over the course of the first four events, AgendaCamp has had more than 300 in-the-flesh participants including: mayors, MPPs, MPs, cabinet ministers, native chiefs, policy wonks, students, professors, factory workers, and factory owners. It has generated more than 100 user created Youtube video clips, and hundreds of wiki entries that have been viewed tens of thousands of times.

And while AgendaCamp is designed to stand on its own, the ideas generated by it have reached many hundreds of thousands through the Agenda on the Road broadcasts. Clips from the camp are rolled into the broadcast and participants are able to ask the panel questions as part of the live studio audience.

Keith will take us through how TVO used the wiki to: plan the events, engage participant interaction through, during and after the events and how the wiki became pivotal for both production and Agenda Camp outcome purposes.

About our Speaker and his organization
Keith Robinson is the supervising editor of tvo.org. TVO is Ontario’s public educational media organization and a trusted source of interactive educational content that informs, inspires, and stimulates curiosity and thought.

Who should come and why

Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

* TV professionals * Those interested in using wikis to amass and disseminate opinion * Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating possible use of wikis * Change transformation agents * Organizational design professionals interested in creating organisational transparency * Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins * Those interested in Deki Wiki * Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity, and, if you are still reading, * You!

About our Sponsors
Citadel Rock provides extranets and intranet strategies based on the Tiki Wiki platform.

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration.

Value Network Analysis is a method that can help you understand what motivates people to participate in exchange monetary and non-monetary (e.g. goodwill, favors, customer insight) transactions across ecosystems (e.g. companies, non-profits and adjoining industries). By knowing the VNA method you will be in a better position to evaluate the likelihood of success for a new venture, and have a systematic approach for taking the perspective of each party in the ecosystem so to appreciate how attractive that ecosystem is to those parties.

Verna Allee is speaking at Knowledge Workers Toronto tomorrow night (no cost to attend) and giving a training all day ($199 USD) at Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation.

Verna’s paper, “Value Network Analysis: Value Conversion of Tangible and Intangible Assets,” just won “Highly Commended Award” in the 2009 Emerald Publishing’s Literati Network Awards for Excellence.

For more information or to reserve one of the few remaining places, please see http://www.meetup.com/Knowledge-Workers-Toronto/

See you at the Groundhog Pub!!
Best,
Martin.

–
Martin Cleaver MSc MBA

http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9716560/

This month’s Toronto Wiki Tuesday speakers are from Toronto Public Library. They will speak about their work on Wikis for Healthcare

Date: 10 March 2008
Time: 6:30 for 7pm

Event Sponsor: Citadel Rock

When and Where:

6:30pm, Tuesday 10th March
See http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9716560/ for location and sign-up

Synopsis

In a large public organization it can be a challenge to quickly adopt new technologies, especially technologies such as wikis which promote decentralization of control.

Donna MacLeod and Sandy Arbuthnot of the Toronto Public Library will discuss how the library has come to use collaborative web tools, the challenges they faced and what they did to overcome these challenges.

The talk will also guide us through two wikis created for the the people of Ontatio and hosted on a low-cost wiki provider: Consumer Health Information Service (CHIS) and CHIS asthma information. Both sites provide reliable health information, written in understandable language, from a Canadian perspective.

They will also describe ways library staff use wikis internally, and an give us an insight into possible future directions for wikis in their online services.

Other Announcements

Derek Wong will provide a short recap of Recent Changes Camp 2009, a 3-day conference on wiki that took place in February in Portland, Oregon.

About our Speakers

Donna MacLeod

Donna MacLeod is a consumer health librarian, providing reference and information services in English and in French to all Ontarians through Toronto Public Library’s Consumer Health Information Service. She also edits and maintains the FACT website, a complementary and alternative health website. In addition, Donna freelances as a writer (articles and computer documentation), researcher, editor and translator (to and from English and French).

Who should come and why: Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

* Healthcare and Library professionals * Public interested in the use of Wikis for Toronto Services * Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating the use of wikis * Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki * Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins * Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on wikis and open collaboration.

Over the past few months I have been experimenting with collecting “life-trail” information about where I go and what I do. If I use an application, or make a phone call, I want it logged. I automate the collection of this output into my personal wiki.

Capturing Information for Billing
Being self-employed it’s very important to me to ensure that I bill my clients correctly. While my clients keep telling me that they appreciate the level of billing I give them, that billing has always incurred a great deal of overhead cost to document.

Last year I used product for the PC called http://www.timesnapper.com. I loved this program: it gave me a breakdown of what I was doing and when I was doing it. (It also collected screenshots which were pretty handy but the analysis was where the value was for me: reclaiming a few minutes was easily enough to pay for the program).

When I moved to a Mac I had to find something new because Timesnapper didn’t make a Mac version. After a brief flirt with RescueTime, I settled on Slife, from Slifelabs.com. The main reason I preferred Slife was because, unlike Rescue Time, which sends your personal information up to the Rescue Time Website, Slife maintains a local database.

Slife captures your web and document histories so you know where you browsed and what you edited. After the fact you can quickly easily figure out when you’re working and when you were “relaxing”, and knowing you’ll be faced with the history adds another level of motivation to get my day started earlier

Capturing for Personal Knowledge Management

I have always been very keen on personal knowledge management. Capturing enables reuse and refinement, and later, delegation.

As useful as Slife it is for billing and productivity, it doesn’t tell the complete story. e.g. What if I’m not a computer?

Well, I do have an iPhone. With this I make phone calls and I go places. So, of course, the iPhone call log knows who I have spoken to. I found and hacked a program (calllog2ical.rb) that queries this database and fixed it so it creates a log of the output instead of writing details to ical. For the GPS my (jailbroken) iPhone has an application called “Locatable”. Locatable really is a tool for programmers that knows your current GPS location and can call a script you write. So I use it to call back to a script that writes a log every 30 minutes noting wherever I go.

I work a lot in a Linix command shell. Whether configuring servers or installing software, a lot of it is tedious detail-oriented expert work. A problem can easily take 45 minutes to solve and result in a command of one or two lines. If six months later, you can hit the same problem, and wish you could remember what you had typed. So, I wrote a modification to my UNIX command line profile (based on the Bash External History method) to record exactly what commands are given to the command line, and I log these too.

When editing I mostly use Emacs. For this I wrote, using emacs-lisp, a script to log which files I was saving. (And, while I was there, created a mechanism whereby (almost) every edit a file would result in a RCS history file to be saved alongside. RCS is very commonly installed, blatantly obvious and doesn’t conflict with modern revision control systems). Now from the log I can see which files I edited, and from the history RCS file, see what I changed.

I’ve hacked together an IRC conversation extractor too. If I was involved in a conversation, it copies that part into the log file, and on to the wiki.

And recently, I built a client to pull in my history of tweets from twitter. These now get filed into my wiki too.

None of the code is production quality. It is all Perl scripts, Shell scripts, and nasty things that invade application’s private databases looking for data.

I’ve discovered it is really neat, albeit sometimes a little anal, to know exactly what I did the last three months, who I spoke to, where I went and what I worked on.

There’s always more I’d like to add: e.g. a call log, such that I can make voice notes or written notes after I’ve concluded a call. And why not share those notes with the person with whom I’ve conversed?

I should, of course, make all this code available. Open source it. I have no objection to doing so: ask me and I will. Indeed many of the components that comprise my solution are already using is open source. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to maintain the code for a community, for it really is not central to what I do. But I would prefer to move my code base into an existing system.

I know companies are working on products that do this type of thing. Do you know of any? How about Open Source ones?