Attending Wikimania 2008 Conference in Alexandria, Egypt was an awesome experience in many ways. Not only did we get a chance to meet many Wiki Enthusiasts from around the world, we also learned a lot from the talk sessions.
MarkDilley did a lightning talk session on the Universal Wiki Edit button and we talked to ~250 people individually about it – the response was quite enthusiastic.
During Ahmed Tantawy’s “Open culture and the Internet in the Middle East.” we learned how statistics show that employees are the best source of innovation for organizations and companies. In fact, more new ideas come from the employees than the R&D / Consultants or Management departments. Wikis prove to be a great resource in organizing this and facilitating the flow of ideas.
A session on Edit Conflicts mentioned the use of FAQs to resolve disputes – articles on AboutUs.org can also greatly benefit from it.
Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley did an excellent session on Wikis: Beyond Encyclopedias – which we were very excited to be mentioned in and it included the very interesting information that they have learned ‘how to build wiki communities about anything’. Two years ago, they were haphazard about it, and if it worked, it worked. Now they know what resources will bring what results. We look forward to talking to them more about that.
We also heard lots of comments about AboutUs, mostly positive, from the wiki community present there. One participant pointed out that we should give more focus to growing our active community, as community helps make wiki’s reliable. We couldn’t agree more! Another interesting criticism came from a privacy advocate who held that “Privacy = Right not to be disturbed” – an interesting, possibly privileged take on privacy in the internet age. Most folks really thought that what AboutUs was doing was pretty interesting.
Quick thoughts
These were also excellent sessions:
- Enric Senabre Hidalgo’s Use of wikis for political participation
- Edo Navot’s Wikipedia as “Real Utopia”
- Cormac Lawler’s Collaborative research in Wikiversity
- In a lighting session we learned of the ease of using SVG in text editor from Terence Yuen
- The Video Editing company Kaltura has ruby API plugin… hmmm – who’s interested in video editing on AboutUs.org? … maybe someone who is making tutorials or guides?
- We met Noam Cohen who writes cool tech pieces for the NYT – often about wiki.
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The observation that employees are with more ideas than Consultants and Management Departments might be true for the reason that the first ones are more eager to prove themselves and the second ones have already done it, but the question is for how long . That is for the Conference, but I must admit that I envy a little bit all those who were in Egypt especially for the reason that I have planned to visit the country for the New Years Holidays.
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