Wikimania is over now, and although I have to admit that I'm relieved in a lot of ways, since it's been a long week, I was still a little bummed to say goodbye to people at the closing event last night. I'm a big believer in the meaning and value of on-line communication, but there's something about being physically present with the people who are making wiki and Open Content happen that means a lot to me.
Saturday's discussions were all pretty good -- I really liked hearing about The Internet Archive and the amazing amount of knowledge they're making available for future generations. 26 million books, 300,000 films, 3-4 million audio recordings... there is a lot of human culture that we can and should preserve in digital format. Brion's talk about future developments in MediaWiki was great, too.
As usual, the hallway conversations were almost as productive as the sessions themselves. I talked to Ray and Mark about using WikiIndex as a clearinghouse for Interwiki coordination. I talked to Ward, who's going to dig in deeper to the MediaWiki parser (impressive!). Maj and I talked with Gil Penchina, who's a real nice guy. And, as the event was wrapping up Saturday evening, I spent a half-hour talking with Kevin Scott, who's got some interesting ideas for launching a new wiki site (or cluster of sites).
As I was getting ready to leave, I ran into a cluster of people around Richard Stallman, who'd shown up more or less out of the blue. He was haranguing the crowd about the term intellectual property, and as Brad Patrick, interim CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation and an IP lawyer, was at the front of the line, I got the feeling that Brad had made the mistake of introducing himself. Whoops.
I talked with Mako for a while; he had a t-shirt that said, "debian-legal stole my DFSG". Excellent! I also met Thomas Malone, and we talked a bit about how an information commons affects what we think of as "work" and "knowledge workers". Everyone was drifting off to eat before the party, and Professor Malone invited me to join him, but I had to get back and see Maj and Amita June. But, catching a familiar face nearby, I said, "Thomas, have you met Ward Cunningham before...?" They headed off to dinner together, and since they were still hanging out when I saw them later at the party, I assume they hit it off.
We had dinner Saturday night at Charlie's Kitchen, a misnamed bar with lots of good, fried crab items. I guess the burgers are good, too, but we enjoyed the seafood and the juke box. Poor Amita June -- growing up in juke joints across North America. She does love french fries, though...
Saturday night we went to the Wikimania party at the MIT Museum, which had an amazing number of great exhibits of neat AI schtuff. I spent some time talking with Professor Malone and Ross Mayfield of SocialText. Ross had on a T-shirt from d-Camp, and as we talked about the BarCamp phenomenon Professor Malone decided to hold one at MIT. Cool.
Ross had some questions about the recent launch of Wikicars, which has some configuration issues at launch time such that the license shown was incorrect. He was glad to hear it was fixed. I think Ross does a good job keeping an eye on the business aspect of wikis -- I don't think there's another blogger out there who's doing quite as good a job at it.
We headed home early -- we've been dragging our poor baby around to too many parties lately -- and got a good night's sleep.
tags: wikimania
Sunday
Sunday's events were pretty good, although I was starting to feel pretty crispy. The discussion about the Wikimedia Foundation's board was really fascinating, but also a bit alarming. The Foundation has a huge job, and they're such a young organization -- like a colt just standing on its feet. Growing pains are inevitable, but it's impressive how committed the people on the board are. They love Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia as much as we all do.
I saw a great discussion of wiki map editing (using SVG and Javascript to provide in-browser editing), something very near and dear to my heart, since we need it for Wikitravel. Sadly it was opposite Joseph Reagle's talk on neutrality, so I missed parts of both switching between events.
The event ended with a big speech about the nature of knowledge by Dave Weinberger. He started off with a hilarious send-up of Lawrence Lessig's presentation style, but got down to some fundamentals of semiotics in a very approachable way. It was a good finisher for the Wikimania event.
Today we're going to stop in to see some people here in Cambridge (Massachusetts), then it's off to New Hampshire and back home. Where we'll be for all of 10 days before packing off for WikiSym. Man, what a month of wikis.
tags: wikimania