on Wikimania 2006, from a few hundred miles away
Wikimania 2006 was last week in Boston; I had it on my travel schedule, tenatively, months in advance, but I didn't really come up with a solid justification, and there were conflicts, so I ended up not going.
I was very interested to see the online participation options, but I didn't get my hopes up too high, because I know that ConnectingAudiences is challenging.
I tried to participate in the transcription stuff real-time; installation of the goby collaborative editor went smoothly enough (it looks like an interesting alternative to SubEthaEdit, though it's client/server, not peer-to-peer; they're talking about switching to the jabber protocol...) but I couldn't seem to connect to any sessions while people were active in them.
The real-time video feed of mako on a definition of Freedom was surprisingly good, though I couldn't give it my full attention during the work day. I didn't understand the problem he was speaking to (isn't GFDL good enough?) until I listened to Lessig on Free Culture and realized that CC share-alike and GFDL don't interoperate. (Yet another reason to keep the test of independent invention in mind at all times.)
Lessig read this quote, but only referred to the author using a photo that I couldn't see via the audio feed; when I looked it up, I realized there was a gap in this student's free culture education:
If we don't want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others.
RMS, 1992
These sessions on the wikipedia process look particularly interesting; I hope to find time to see or listen to a recording:
- The Process of Requests for Adminship on the English Wikipedia: The Role of Trust in an Open System
- A Question-and-answer session with the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee
I bumped into TimBL online and remind him about the Wikipedia and the Semantic Web panel; he had turned it down because of other travel obligations, but he just managed to stop by after all. I hope it went allright; he was pretty jet-lagged.
I see WikiSym 2006 coming up August 21-23, 2006 in Odense, Denmark. I'm not sure I can find justification to make travel plans on just a few weeks of notice. But Denny's hottest conference ever item burns like salt in an open wound and motivates me to give it a try. It looks like the SweetWiki folks, who participate in the GRDDL WG, will be there; that's the start of a justification...