Grants:PEG/WM Wikisym/WikiSym 2011

Funded

This submission to the Wikimedia Foundation Grants Program was funded in the fiscal year 2010-11. This is a grant to a group.

IMPORTANT: Please do not make changes to this page now. They will be reverted.

• This project has been funded, completed, and a project report has been reviewed and accepted by WMF Staff.
• To review a list of other funded submissions by fiscal year, please visit the Requests subpage, and to review the WMF Grants Program criteria for funding please visit the Grants:Index.

This Wikimedia Foundation grant has a fiscal sponsor. The John Ernest Foundation administered the grant on behalf of The Wikisym Initiative.

Legal name of chapter

N/A

Legal name of fiscal sponsor

The John Ernest Foundation

Grant contact name

Dirk Riehle.

Grant contact user-name or e-mail

dirk@riehle.org

Grant contact title (position)

Treasurer

Project lead name

Felipe Ortega

Project lead user-name or e-mail

User:GlimmerPhoenix, jfelipe@libresoft.es

Project lead title (position), if any

General Chair

Full project name

WikiSym 2011

Amount requested (in USD)

$20,000

Provisional target start date

April 2010 (early initiatives)

Provisional completion date

October 3-6 (conference days)

Budget breakdown

This grantee has requested a change to the budget submitted here and this change has been approved by WMF. Please see the discussion page for details.

• WikiSym passports: $3,000
  • Free tickets (3-day, full conference registration) for 10 attendees from WMF.
• Contribution to coffe breaks/Lunch: $8,000
  • Provided by MSR Silicon Valley service. Will display WMF logo sponsoring the corresponding break/lunch on conference program.
• Contribution to conference materials: $1,500
  • Totebag, pen-drives...
  • Include WMF logo (monochrome) and promotional material (as per request, provided by WMF).
• Wikimedia Data Challenge: $5,500
  • Prize and/or grants for winners.
• Contribution to grants for on-site volunteers: $2,000
  • Individual grants for students and community volunteers helping with on-site organization.

Project scope

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2011, WikiSym celebrates its 7th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Mountain View, California at the Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley.

The conference program will include a peer-reviewed research track, as well as workshops, a doctoral consortium, invited keynotes and panel speakers. Open Space, a participant-organized track will also run throughout the conference. Many of the most innovative technology companies in the world have a presence in Mountain View, which makes it an ideal venue for hatching new ideas and thoughtful debate about collaborative computing among technologists, researchers, educators, and activists. We expect to reach the full capacity of the conference venue (~250 attendees).

Project goal

The goal of WikiSym is to become a reference forum for researchers, practitioners, industry and entrepeneurs in open collaboration to share their ongoing works, interests and opportunities for cooperation.

Topics of interest for the conference 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 open resources in specific fields.

Besides the main conference track, the proposal is focused on 2 specific initiatives that could be of great interest for both WMF and WikiSym audience:

• Wikimedia Research session: Since 2009 WikiSym hosts a Wikipedia research session as part of the main conference track, which has led to interesting outcomes such as the Wikipedia Research policy and the SRAG. We believe that it is essential to continue with this special session, supporting the great work of researchers around Wikimedia projects worldwide, as well as to welcome new participants.

• Wikimedia Data Challenge: This is an early event to raise awareness about research with WMF open data. The idea is to offer an interesting dataset selected from a WMF project. A website will publish a global open call (challenge) to answer specific questions using this data set. In this way, we can offer a direct path for the community to help WMF (working on interdisciplinary and different perspectives) to answer these questions. A committee will review the submissions, to select the best ones for presentation at the conference.

Non-financial requirements

To organize Wikimedia Data Challenge:

• Simple website (probably a MediaWiki) setup to announce the challenge and collect submissions from participants.

• Support from Howie Fung, Erik Zachte, Erik Möller and the WMF Research Board (small committee would be enough) to select an appropriate data set, formule a set of questions to be answered by participants in the Challenge and review sumbissions to select the winners.

Fit to strategy

WMF sponsorship will be aimed at improving their visibility and commitment in ongoing initatives and projects among like-minded organizations. Likewise, WMF will increase its outreach scope to private companies, entrepeneurs and research centers working in open collaboration, open knowledge and open web technologies.

Concrete events such as an Open Data Challenge, or the Wikimedia Research Session are specifically conceived to increase awareness and participation among researchers from a broad range of disciplines in WMF projects.

Other benefits

Participation of other well-known sponsors (such as Creative Commons) will help WikiSym to have better impact among the target audience. Sponsorships from big private organizations, such as Microsoft (conference host in 2011) is also a good opportunity to deliver key messages about WMF strategy, mission, and opportunities for collaboration to an audience who cannot be easily addressed otherwise.

Measures of success

We can define several concrete measurements for success and impact:

• Number of attendees to the main conference.
• Number of attendees to the Wikipedia Research Session.
• Number of different research works on WMF projects presented.
• Number of submissions received to the Wikimedia Data Challenge.
• Number of new proposals and intiatives launched in WikiSym 2011.