I'm on the plane back from Portland right now, and I figure it's as good a time as any to write up my thoughts about RecentChangesCamp this weekend. I was hoping to do some more blogging during the event itself, but during the day I didn't really have time to be nose-down in my notebook. During the evening, I had really crappy wireless connectivity. I have an Atheros chip built in with my Portégé, which just doesn't work very well with either my power management or Ubuntu's wireless networking tools.
But on top of that, the Jupiter Hotel's wireless was less than optimal – it was out of commission two of the four nights I was staying there, despite my hassling calls to the front desk. I liked the hotel a lot, but the lack of good connectivity was disappointing. On the plus side, I got really hooked on the Doug Fir restaurant attached to the hotel. They have good food, and some really nice beers. I had a nice ahi steak one night, good pancakes one morning.
But now's my opportunity to do a brain dump while it's all still fresh in my mind. Last year's RecentChangesCamp was my and Maj's first in-person introduction to some of the people who are shaping the technology and culture of wiki. Since we've had both Wikimania and Wikisym 2006 since then, it's funny to have come around full-circle on what you could call the “wiki conference circuit”. Especially since I was coming to Portland solo, I wasn't sure what to expect.
Friday morning I drove down to the conference venue, Audio Cinema, which is under the Hawthorne Bridge in a kind of sketchy warehouse district. I'm not sure how many people got the irony of holding our wiki conference under a bridge, but we managed to more or less avoid any dangerous trolls. Any that popped up would have found a group pretty experienced in dealing with them, though.
Audio Cinema is a really funky venue – a warehouse with couches, stages, lofts, and lots of space to run around. It was really nice and gave a little more of a grass-roots feel than the typical hotel-conference-room meeting area. But the place was drafty, and most of the participants wore toques, fleece jackets and/or GoreTex shells during the entire event. And, no, it's not just because they were all Oregonians. There were people from other parts of the world, too, and on top of that, I've heard rumors that there exist some Cascadians who don't dress like they're on a 2-week backpacking trip.
That aside, Friday morning the event was in disarray. Ray King, who'd done a lot – probably too much – of the organizing had got in late the night before from a 3-day trip to New York at perhaps exactly the wrong time for the event. He wasn't there when the event opened, and consequently most of the food and registration materials weren't there either. On top of that, the huge coffee urns that we were using were really slow to brew coffee, so we didn't have any java for the first hour or so. On the plus side, Brandon Sanders had put together an awesome self-service registration app that people could use for registering. It took pictures and got contact information and set up a user account on the RCC wiki – really introducing people into the process right from the get-go.
Once Ray hit the ground, though, we had cool, free fleece vests, name badges, and a whole lot of awesome stickers. I don't know where this idea came from, but it may be the best way of welcoming people I've heard of. The organizers go through the signup list of participants on the wiki and make a list of all the organizations they're affiliated with. Then, they make teensy 1cm x 0.5 cm stickers with the orgs' logos on them, so that participants can put the logos on their name badges. It is really great to recognize that most people have a lot of different groups they participate in, and it also is a good conversation starter. Most of all, it makes people feel like they're wanted and valued. You just hear over and over at the registration table, “I can't believe they have stickers for [Name of my organization]!”
RecentChangesCamp runs on Open Space Technology, which may be the best way to have a conference that I've ever seen. The two facilitators, Ted Ernst and Kaliya (Identity Woman) introduced people to the process, and then we put up sessions on the wall. Having been through the process twice before, I was pretty aggressive about what I wanted to talk about: Wikiwyg and Wiki commercialization on the first day, Wiki Ohana on the second day.
I joined in with Dan Mandell of ICANN Wiki and Portland Wiki to talk about Wikiwyg in the greater context of wiki usability. I was a little bummed out by this, since I really wanted to discuss the architecture of Wikiwyg with technical people to get them to consider implementing it, but instead I ended up making vague promises to non-technical people about its possible applicability and general griping about the sorry state of wiki software UI.
My discussion on Wiki commercialization went much better. I had about 20 people in the session, and I spent a lot of the time talking about the process of making Wikitravel into a commercial venture, lessons learned and other stories. It was good also talking to Ray King, since aboutus.org is another commercial wiki.
I tried to concentrate on methods to preserve openness, transparency, and fair process, but the conversation drifted a bit into the nigh-impossible concept of compensating wiki participants for their contributions. Not only do I think this is insanely impossible to do right or fairly, but I'm 100% sure that if you changed the motivation for wiki participants from altruism, love of the subject, and dedication to a creative commons (small c's), the quality of the community and of the content would suffer immensely. It would also require the wiki company to extract more value out of the content created, which I think would mean more predatory or uncooperative business practices.
One nice idea that was floated was to donate some of the profits of the company to a cause that participants would likely support, such as Creative Commons (big c's), the Wikimedia Foundation, or other wiki-, open-source-, or open-content-related non-profits.
All in all I got some real value out of the session, at least in seeing what people would want to talk about. I have a session at South by Southwest scheduled in March in which I'll talk about the very subject of this discussion. (When Brandon Sanders and Ted Ernst heard about it, they said, “Evan, you're crowdsourcing us!” How embarrassing, but true.)
Later in the day I talked to Stewart from Atlassian about patterns of wiki adoption. As sometimes happens, I didn't actually plan to be in his session – I was just checking my email while sitting in his session's area. But I really enjoyed talking to him. He's a wiki evangelist for Atlassian, which sounds to be about the most awesome job in the entire universe. He also does a lot of work in wiki in education.
One thing that Maj hated about going back to school was that after years of meaningful, challenging work she was back doing fake, made-up problems and assignments in a classroom setting. “It just seems so stupid to write a paper on a subject that tens of thousands of people have written on before. It's idiotic.” One practice that Stewart talked about people using in education is that a class (like the fall 2006 semester of History 101) will create a wiki to collaborate on their work. Then, the next semester in Spring 2007, the new class taking History 101 will build on that same wiki, adding new information, refining and refactoring discussions, and elucidating details of the subject. It seems like such a great idea – standing on the shoulders of your predecessors in class.
I also had a chance to talk in a session about wikis and Open Content licenses. Aboutus.org is trying to decide on a license for the original work done on that wiki, and the talk centered around the best way to do that. I recommended that Ray talk to Jack Herrick of wikiHow, who used the Attibution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license and now regrets the “NC” part.
Friday night I was so exhausted that I went back to my hotel room and conked out at 9PM. The next day, I had a couple of other interesting sessions. I talked with John Abbe about his bete noire, SisterSites, and how to implement it for MediaWiki. SisterSites is a technique for linking pages with the same name on related wikis automatically. I think the process would be pretty useful for Wikitravel – we do a lot of manual linking with related pages on Wikipedia, Open Directory, and other language versions of Wikitravel – but the technology isn't there yet. I was surprised to find out that Brion Vibber, MW lead developer, had done a spike version of SisterSites for MediaWiki last fall. I'm going to see what I can do to revive it and make it production-ready. Ward Cunningham is interested in working more with MediaWiki, so I'm going to see what I can do to work with him on the project.
I also got a chance to talk to Lion Kimbro about his own pet project, Local Names. Local Names is a way to define a vocabulary that matches words to an URL. It comes out of the idea of really simple linking, but would make it easy to make simple links in other kinds of software, like blogs or forums. I like the idea a lot, and I really love the flexibility of using a wiki engine for my blog.
I led a session about the idea and practice of Wiki Ohana. Wiki technology is not really rocket science; the important part of wiki is the social values and culture it engenders. However, wiki technology is expanding faster than wiki culture, to the detriment of both. Wiki users who don't know about the culture that goes with the technology will make a lot of mistakes and not work together effectively. And the greater wiki community suffers if there are potential members that we don't know about or have contact with.
The word “ohana” means “extended family,” and the idea of Wiki Ohana is to treat the wiki community like an extended family. Like a family, you don't really get to choose whether or not you're a member; if you use wikis, you're part of the ohana, whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not. Our community needs to do some outreach to our ohana so that they know that we're here as a resource, and so they can consciously choose to use that resource or not.
One idea that have come up already are to make formal welcomes of new wikis to our ohana. We would tell them about the ohana idea, and give them some links to sites about the wiki community, wiki practices, and wiki software, so they would know how to get in touch with us. We'd also encourage wiki founders and communities to welcome new users to the ohana, as well as to the local wiki. A couple of new ideas that came up from the session: inviting wiki software developers to include an OHANA file in their download tarball or zip file with the same message; talking to wiki farm owners about including the ohana welcome in new wikis, or at least a link; and coordinating ohana welcomes through Wiki Index.
Speaking of which, I also got a chance to brainstorm with Ray, Ted, Mark Dilley, John Stanton and Ward about the future of Wiki Index. They feel like the original purpose of Wiki Index – to document the existing wikis on the Web – doesn't sufficently reflex their passion for wiki. As someone told Mark, “You guys are so hot about wiki, and this site is so cool.”
To be continued here
Todo list from RCC 2007:
Try to get an OHANA file into MediaWiki
This year's RCC lacked the element of surprise and novelty for me, but my familiarity with the people and subjects gave a little more depth and richness to the conversations I had.
tags: recentchangescamp rcc07