Hello. This is a formal version of the first call for contributions to WikiSym 2012. It will be also available on the 2012 website, as soon as our new wiki is ready (in short time).

WikiSym 2012 Call for Participation

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8th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

August 27-29, 2012 | Linz, Austria

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2012, WikiSym celebrates its 8th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Linz, Austria.  We are excited this year to be collocated with Ars Electronica, the premier digital art and science meeting that attracts over 35,000 attendees per year.

Submissions are invited for the following categories:

[1] As determined at the International Date Line. In other words, as long as it’s still April 7th or April 27 somewhere on Earth, the system will accept your submissions.

The conference program will include a peer-reviewed research track, experience reports, workshops, posters, demos, a doctoral consortium, invited keynotes and panel speakers. As always, the participant-organized Open Space track will run throughout the conference. Evening social events will follow, because wiki folks know the value of a good party for sparking conversation and collaboration. Finally, WikiSym co-occurs with Ars Electronica, and we are arranging experiences where conference attendees can enjoy this innovative and unusual event.

Topics appropriate for submissions include all aspects of the people, tools, contexts, and content that comprise open collaboration systems. For example:

• Collaboration tools and processes
• Social and cultural aspects of collaboration
• Collaboration beyond text: images, video, sound, etc.
• Communities and workgroups
• Knowledge and information production
• New media literacies
• Uses and impact of wikis and other open resources, tools, and practices in fields and application areas, for example:
• Open source software development and use
• Education and Open Educational Resources
• E-government, open government, and public policy
• Law/Intellectual Property (including Creative Commons)
• Journalism (including participatory journalism)
• Art and Entertainment (including collaborative and audience-involved art)
• Science (including collaboratories)
• Publishing (including open access and open review models)
• Business (including open and collaborative management styles)

In addition to research and development topics, WikiSym also invites innovative proposals for open, collaborative art and performance.  These proposals should be made directly to the conference chairs.

General submission instructions and information

All accepted submissions will be published in the WikiSym proceedings and archived in the ACM Digital Library. Long and short research papers will be rigorously peer reviewed and treated as archival publications. Submissions to other tracks will also be reviewed and appear in the ACM DL, but they are considered to be non-archival and may be used as the basis for later publications. Authors of research papers should use the ACM/CHI SIG Proceedings Format, and other contribution types will use the ACM/CHI Extended Abstracts Format. Templates for both formats are available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

General submission instructions will be posted and the conference submission site opened around March 1. Instructions for the various contribution types are below.

Research Papers – Long (up to 10 pages) and Short (up to 4 pages)

Research papers present integrative reviews or original reports of substantive new work: theoretical, empirical, and/or in the design, development and/or deployment of novel systems.
Research papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee to meet rigorous academic standards of publication. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, conceptual quality, innovation and clarity of presentation. They should be written in English and must not exceed 10 pages (for full papers) or 4 pages (for short papers). At least one author of accepted papers is required to attend the conference in order to present the paper.

Workshops (up to 6 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

Workshops provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to discuss and learn about topics that require in-depth, extended engagement such as new systems, research methods, standards, and formats.

Workshop proposals should describe what you intend to do and how your session will meet the criteria described above. It should include a concise abstract, proposed time frame (half-day or full-day), what you plan to do during the workshop, and one-paragraph biographies of all organizers. Workshop proposals will be reviewed and selected for their interest to the community. Each accepted workshop will be provided with a meeting room for either a half or full day. Organizers may also request technology and materials (projector, flip pads, etc).

Panels (up to 6 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

Panels provide an interactive forum for bringing together people with interesting points of view to discuss compelling issues around open collaboration. Panels involve participation from both the panelists and audience members in a lively discussion. Proposals for panels should describe the topics and goals and explain how the panel will be organized and how the Wikisym community will benefit. It should include a concise abstract and one-paragraph biographies of panelists and moderators. Panel submissions will be reviewed and selected for their interest to the community. Each panel will be given a 90-minute time slot.

Experience Reports (up to 16 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

Experience reports are an integral part of the conference program. These are opportunities to discuss how ideas that sound good on paper (and at conferences!) work in real life projects and deployments. Many attendees want to learn from people on the front lines what it is like to do things like start a company wiki, use open collaboration tools in a classroom, or build a political campaign around open collaboration systems. Experience reports are not research papers; their goal is to present experience and reflections on a particular case, and they are reviewed for usefulness, clarity and reflection. Strong experience reports discuss both benefits and drawbacks of the approaches used and clearly call out lessons learned. Reports may focus on a particular aspect of technology usage and practice, or describe broad project experiences.

Posters (up to 4 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

Poster presentations enable researchers to present late-breaking results, significant work in progress, or work that is best communicated in conversation. WikiSym’s lively poster sessions let conference attendees exchange ideas one-on-one with authors, and let authors discuss their work in detail with those attendees most deeply interested in the topic. Poster proposals may describe original research, engineering, or experience reports. Successful applicants will display their posters, up to 1x2m in size, at a special session during the Symposium.

Demos (up to 4 pages, Extended Abstracts format)

No format is better suited for demonstrating the utility of new collaboration technologies than showing and using them. Demonstrations give presenters an opportunity to show running systems and gather feedback. Demo submissions should provide a setup for the demo, a specific description of what you plan to demo, what you hope to get out of demoing, and how the audience will benefit. A short note of any special technical requirements should be included. Demo submissions will be reviewed based on their relevance to the community.

Doctoral Symposium

The WikiSym 2012 Doctoral Symposium is a forum in which Ph.D. students can meet and discuss their work with each other and a panel of experienced researchers and practitioners. The symposium will be held on Tuesday August 28 on the campus of Johannes Kepler University. More information about the symposium’s leaders, goals, submission process and criteria, and funding will be posted shortly.

Open Space

For short and informal opportunities to organize discussion, brain-storming, and other collaborative activities, the Open Space track will run throughout WikiSym. Open Space is an entirely participant-organized track and requires no submission or review.

Note on Publications

Work submitted to Wikisym is published in the ACM digital library.  This means it is not open access.  However, ACM has a very new service called ACM Author-izer which allows authors to post official copies of their papers on personal websites for people to access, even if those people do not have access to the ACM digital library.  We see this as a step to open access and are pleased to support this service.

http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service

WikiSym archives its proceedings in the ACM Digital Library (as well as on our own servers). The use of the ACM DL is due to our roots in computer science, even though the scope has been extending significantly since the original WikiSym in 2005. The ACM recently published an explanation of its Copyright Policy that explains the extensive set of rights retained by authors who sign the ACM copyright transfer form, which is a precondition for publishing in the ACM Digital Library. These rights include the option to reuse your own work in future papers, to publish your work for non-commercial reasons, and more. A new initiative of the ACM lets authors use the ACM servers for retrieving a paper copy for free. You can read the article’s text online.

One of the traditions of WikiSym is “Open Space”. Our facilitator this year is Ted Ernst, a long-time member of the WikiSym community. Starting in 2005 as an attendee, Ted has subsequently served as an Open Space facilitator or co-facilitator in 2006, 2007, and 2008.

What does Ted do when he’s not at WikiSym? “You know how executives sometimes find that the business isn’t growing as fast as they want it to and they end up spending more and more time at work? What I do is coach executive teams on habits that both reliably grow and drastically reduce the amount of time required to manage the business.”

The following are some questions about Open Space and Ted’s answers.

Can you summarize the basic structure and philosophy of Open Space?

Open Space unleashes all the energy of a good coffee break, while providing enough structure to ensure that the right players are in each of those conversations.

What should participants expect when they arrive in Open Space?

Open Space is the self-organization we see in wiki, in real space. Expect to see a blank agenda wall to be filled up with topics convened by those present. Every topic people care about enough to convene a session on will get discussed/worked on by the others interested in that topic.

How does Open Space differ from the “birds of a feather” or “special interest group” gatherings common at other conferences?

Birds of a feather are great gatherings for these interest groups that are known in advance. Open space is best for those groups that haven’t been thought of before, or have never been convened. No one knows in advance which thoughts/topics/projects/ideas/etc. will have people excited on the day of the event, and Open Space allows us to roll with the energy we have in the moment.

How has Open Space changed in the time you’ve been facilitating?

Open Space is a minimal structure that allows self-organizing to happen and thus hasn’t changed in the time I’ve been facilitating. The growing edge for facilitators worldwide is looking for one more thing not to do. Everything that remains has withstood the test of time. Nothing significant has been added in 15-20 years.

What has surprised you most about being an Open Space facilitator?

It always works. No matter the looks on people’s faces, or how long it takes for the first session to be posted, every group I’ve ever experienced in Open Space does fill the wall with topics and great conversations happen.

What is your most striking memory from Open Space sessions?

At WikiSym 2008 in Porto, Portugal, Dan Ingalls from Sun Microsystems gave an invited talk on the Lively Kernel. Afterwards, he posted an Open Space topic to go deeper with anyone. He sat at a table one on one with a single WikiSym participant for 90 minutes. What a great opportunity for this “famous” person to spend that kind of time informally with someone truly interested (as opposed to all of the polite listening that can happen in an auditorium-type setting when that’s the only option), and what an opportunity for this one participant whose excitement was sparked by Dan’s talk!

Anything else you’d like to share?

Be prepared to be surprised!

Last but not least, the posters session will feature the 15 posters listed below, along with 8 more from the doctoral consortium selectees, with authors available and excited to chat with you about their work. See the schedule for details on when and where to go.

• Wikipedia Category Visualization Using Radial Layout. Robert P. Biuk-Aghai and Felix Hon Hou Cheang.
• Wiki Refactoring: an Assisted Approach Based on Ballots. Oscar Diaz, Gorka Puente, and Cristóbal Arellano.
• Visualizing Author Contribution Statistics in Wikis Using an Edit Significance Metric. Peter Kin-Fong Fong and Robert P. Biuk-Aghai.
• The Center for Open Learning and Teaching. Pete Forsyth and Robert E. Cummings.
• “G1: Patent nonsense”: Participation and Outcomes in Wikipedia’s Article Deletion Processes. R. Stuart Geiger and Heather Ford.
• Wiki Architectures as Social Translucence Enablers. Stephanie Gokhman, David Mcdonald, and Mark Zachry.
• Failures of Social Production: Evidence from Wikipedia. Andreea Gorbatai.
• TWiki: A collaboration tool for the Large Hadron Collider. Peter Jones and Nils Hoimyr.
• A Scourge to the Pillar of Neutrality: A WikiProject Fighting Systemic Bias. Randall Livingstone.
• Places on the Map and in the Cloud: Representations of Locality and Geography in Wikipedia. Randall Livingstone.
• Exploring Linguistic Points of View of Wikipedia. Paolo Massa and Federico Scrinzi.
• Personality Traits, Feedback Mechanisms and their Impact on Motivation to Contribute to Wikis in Higher Education. Athanasios Mazarakis and Clemens Van Dinther.
• CoSyne: a Framework for Multilingual Content Synchronization of Wikis. Christof Monz, Vivi Nastase, Matteo Negri, Angela Fahrni, Yashar Mehdad, and Michael Strube.
• Incentivizing the ASL-STEM Forum. Kyle Rector, Richard Ladner, and Michelle Shepardson.
• Wiki as Business Application Platform: The MES Showcase. Christoph Sauer.

The demos session will feature four awesome demonstrations. See the schedule for details on when and where to go.

Wikiotics: The Interactive Language Instruction Wiki

Ian Sullivan, James R. Garrison, Matthew Curinga

While most existing wiki systems are geared toward editing text documents, we have built Wikiotics to enable the collaborative creation of interactive multimedia materials most needed in language instruction. In our demonstration, we will show several types of interactive lessons that can be created from simple multimedia elements. We will also show the lesson creation/editing interfaces and how our smart phone app can simplify the process of capturing local media and integrating that new media into existing lessons.

PukiWiki-Java Connector, a Simple API for Saving Data of Java Programs on a Wiki

Takashi Yamanoue, Kentaro Oda, Koichi Shimozono

Experimental implementation of SDK for Java Programs, PukiWiki-Java Connector, which makes an illusion that wiki pages as persistent data store, is shown. A Java program of them can be running on a wiki page and it can save its data on the page. The Java program consists of PukiWiki which is a popular wiki in Japan, the plug-in which starts up Java Applets. A Java Applet with default access privilege cannot store its data at the local host. We have constructed the API for the applets to ease data persistent at a remote host. We also combined the API and the wiki system by introducing a wiki plugin and tags for starting up Java Applets. Applet generated persistent data resides in wiki texts side by side. We have successfully ported useful programs such as a simple text editor, a simple music editor, a simple draw program and programming environments in a PukiWiki system using this connector.

Collaborative Video Editing for Wikipedia

Michael Dale

Collaborative video for Wikipedia faces several challenges from social and community adoption to technology limitations. This presentation explores how each of these problems are being addressed. The presentation focuses on building a collaborative educational video community and how the html5 technology platform has evolved to better support rich media applications such as HTML5 video editing in the browser and standardization around the royalty free WebM video format. Finally we propose a in-browser collaborative video sequencer to enable broad participation in video editing within Wikimedia projects.

Wiki4EAM – Using Hybrid Wikis for Enterprise Architecture Management

Florian Matthes, Christian Neubert

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a challenging task, modern enterprises have to face. This task is often addressed via heavy-weight and expensive EAM tools to collect, structure, visualize and analyze architectural information. A major problem in EAM is the mismatch between the existing unstructured information sources and the rigid information structures and collaboration mechanisms provided by today’s EAM tools.

To address this mismatch, researchers at Technische Universität München established in 2010 a community of experienced enterprise architects from 25 large German enterprises to pursue a different, wiki-based approach to EAM. The idea is to start with existing unstructured information sources captured as wiki pages (e.g., derived from Office documents) and then to incrementally and collaboratively enrich the wiki pages with attributes, types and integrity rules as needed for architecture modeling, visualization and analysis.

An off-the shelf commercial enterprise wiki (Tricia by infoAsset AG) provides the required incremental information structuring capabilities as so-called Hybrid Wikis. Customizable in-browser visualizations are provided by the System Cartography Tool developed at Technische Universität München.

The closing keynote at WikiSym 2011 will be delivered by Dr. Ed Chi, a staff research scientist at Google and a well-known figure in the HCI community, with over 80 research publications.

Model-Driven Research in Social Computing

Research in Augmented Social Cognition is aimed at enhancing the ability of a group of people to remember, think, and reason. Our approach to creating this augmentation or enhancement is primarily model-driven. Our system developments are informed by models such as information scent, sensemaking, information theory, probabilistic models, and more recently, evolutionary dynamic models. These models have been used to understand a wide variety of user behaviors, from individuals interacting with social bookmark search in Delicious and MrTaggy.com to groups of people working on articles in Wikipedia. These models range in complexity from a simple set of assumptions to complex equations describing human and group behaviors.

By studying online social systems such as Google Plus, Twitter, Delicious, and Wikipedia, we further our understanding of how knowledge is constructed in a social context. In this talk, I will illustrate how a model-driven approach could help illuminate the path forward for research in social computing and community knowledge building.

We’ll be posting similar previews of the other two keynotes shortly.

Note: Dr. Chi replaces Bernardo Huberman in the closing keynote slot.

The WikiSym 2011 Doctoral Symposium will be held as a pre-conference event on October 2nd, 2011 on the campus of Stanford University. Accepted PhD students have been invited to present their dissertation work and participate in discussions and feedback sessions with three faculty mentors:

• Loren Terveen, University of Minnesota
• Coye Cheshire, University of California at Berkeley
• Robert Biuk-Aghai, University of Macau

Students will also present their work as a poster during the conference, to encourage more feedback and discussions with the WikiSym research community.

Doctoral students studying any aspect of open collaboration were invited to apply for a position in the symposium. Applications were reviewed by the panel of faculty mentors and accepted students received travel support and conference registration courtesy of the National Science Foundation.

Eight students were accepted to participate. Their names, affiliations, and research titles are as follows.

• Daniel Araya, University of Illinois. Learning and Education in an Age of Collective Intelligence
• Adam Fish, UCLA. Liberalism & Neoliberalism in Internet & Television Convergence
• Helge Hemmer, University of Wuppertal. Bridging the Gap between Research Lab, Student Experiments and Business Reality
• Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, Syracuse University. Social Networking Technologies and Information Knowledge Sharing in Organizations
• Brian Keegan, Northwestern University. Breaking News on Wikipedia: Dynamics, Structures, and Practices of High-Tempo Collaboration
• Katherine Panciera, University of Minnesota. The When and Why of User Participation
• Heather Willever-Farr, Drexel University. Who Are We? Family History Peer Production on the Web
• Shun Ye, University of Maryland. Truck, Barter, and Exchange: An Empirical Investigation of P2P Barter Markets

In partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, we are pleased to announce the winners of WikiViz 2011, a visualization contest focused on exploring how Wikipedia, in concert with other open data sources, has made the world a better place. The contest solicited “the most effective, compelling, and creative data-driven visualizations of how Wikipedia impacted the world with its content, culture, and open collaboration model” (from the WMF’s announcement).

The winner is: Jen Lowe of Datatelling with “A Thousand Fibers Connect Us — Wikipedia’s Global Reach”. Click the title to explore the Jen’s visualization.

Congratulations to Jen! And thanks to our jury: Moritz Stefaner of Well Formed Data, Kim Rees of Periscopic, Andrew Vande Moere of KU Leuven and Information Aesthetics, Erick Zachte of WMF, and Gregorio Convertino of PARC.

The technical session Sustaining Open Collaboration will feature three presentations. See the schedule for details on when and where to go.

Don’t Bite the Newbies: How Reverts Affect the Quantity and Quality of Wikipedia Work

Aaron Halfaker, Aniket Kittur, John Riedl

Reverts are important to maintaining the quality of Wikipedia. They fix mistakes, repair vandalism, and help enforce policy. However, reverts can also be damaging, especially to the aspiring editor whose work they destroy. In this research we analyze 400,000 Wikipedia revisions to understand the effect that reverts had on editors. We seek to understand the extent to which they demotivate users, reducing the workforce of contributors, versus the extent to which they help users improve as encyclopedia editors. Overall we find that reverts are powerfully demotivating, but that their net influence is that more quality work is done in Wikipedia as a result of reverts than is lost by chasing editors away. However, we identify key conditions – most specifically new editors being reverted by much more experienced editors – under which reverts are particularly damaging. We propose that reducing the damage from reverts might be one effective path for Wikipedia to solve the newcomer retention problem.

Mentoring in Wikipedia: A Clash of Cultures

David R. Musicant, Yuqing Ren, James A. Johnson, John Riedl

The continuous success of Wikipedia depends upon its capability to recruit and engage new editors, especially those with new knowledge and perspectives. Yet Wikipedia over the years has become a complicated bureaucracy that may be difficult for newcomers to navigate. Mentoring is a practice that has been widely used in offline organizations to help new members adjust to their roles. In this paper, we draw insights from the offline mentoring literature to analyze mentoring practices in Wikipedia and how they influence editor behaviors. Our quantitative analysis of the Adopt-a-user program shows mixed success of the program. Communication between adopters and adoptees is correlated with the amount of article editing done by adoptees shortly after adoption. Our qualitative analysis of the communication between adopters and adoptees suggests that several key functions of mentoring are missing or not fulfilled consistently. Most adopters focus on establishing their legitimacy rather than acting proactively to guide, protect, and support the long-term growth of adoptees. We conclude with recommendations of how Wikipedia mentoring programs can evolve to take advantage of offline best practices.

“How Should I Go from __ to __ Without Getting Killed?” Motivation and Benefits in Open Collaboration

Katherine Panciera, Mikhil Masli, Loren Terveen

Many people rely on open collaboration projects to run their computer (Linux), browse the web (Mozilla Firefox), and get information (Wikipedia). While these projects are successful, many such efforts suffer from lack of participation. Understanding what motivates users to participate and the benefits they perceive from their participation can help address this problem. We examined these issues through a survey of contributors and information consumers in the Cyclopath geographic wiki. We analyzed subject responses to identify a number of key motives and perceived benefits. Based on these results, we articulate several general techniques to encourage more and new forms of participation in open collaboration communities. Some of these techniques have the potential to engage information consumers more deeply and productively in the life of open collaboration communities.

Just in time for the International Day of Being Awesome, we are pleased to announce the Best Paper awards for WikiSym 2011.

One long paper and one short paper have been selected on the basis of outstanding reviews and evaluation by our awards committee. By coincidence only, both papers address similar themes.

The Best Full Paper is:

WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance
Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Anuradha Uduwage, Zhenhua Dong, Shilad Sen, David R. Musicant, Loren Terveen, John Riedl

The Best Short Paper is:

Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing
Judd Antin, Raymond Yee, Coye Cheshire and Oded Nov

Congratulations to the winners! And thanks to our selection committee members: Kevin Crowston, Andreea Gorbatai, Amy Bruckman, and Nicolas Jullien.