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

THE 8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS

Hammamet, Tunisia, 10-13 September 2012

Scope of OSS 2012

Over the past two decades, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has introduced new successful models for creating, distributing, acquiring and using software and software-based services. Inspired by the success of FLOSS, other forms of open initiatives have been gaining momentum. Open source systems (OSS) now extend beyond software to include open access, open documents, open science, open education, open government, open cloud, open hardware, open artworks and museum exhibits, open innovation and more. On the one hand, the openness movement has created new kinds of opportunities such as the emergence of new business models, knowledge exchange mechanisms, and collective development approaches. On the other hand, the movement has introduced new kinds of challenges, especially as different problem domains embrace openness as a pervasive problem solving strategy. OSS can be complex yet widespread and often cross-cultural. Consequently, they require an interdisciplinary understanding of their technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.

The goal of 8th International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2012, the first to be held in Africa, is to provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry and public sector, and diverse OSS initiatives can come together to share research findings and practical experiences. The conference is also meant to provide information and education to practitioners, identify directions for further research, and to be an ongoing platform for technology transfer, no matter which form of OSS is being pursued.

OSS 2012 accepts submissions in the following categories: research papers, industry papers, formal tool demonstrations, lightning talks and posters. OSS 2012 also invites proposals for tutorials and workshops, submissions to the doctoral symposium, and submissions of panels. Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings, which are published by Springer. The major conference theme is long-term sustainability with OSS.

Topics of Interest

OSS sustainability

• Sustainability models of OSS
• Building sustainable OSS communities
• Role of OSS in ICT and sustainable development
• Mining sustainability related data from OSS communities
• Experience reports and lessons on sustainable OSS ecosystems

OSS as innovation

• Adoption/ use / acceptance of OSS
• Dissemination / redistribution / crowdsourcing of OSS systems
• Expanding scientific research and technology development methods through openness
• Adopting innovation in OSS projects

OSS practices and methods

• OSS and traditional / agile development methods
• OSS and decentralized development
• Knowledge and documentation management in OSS

OSS technologies

• OSS over the Internet
• Security of OSS
• Interoperability / portability / scalability of OSS
• Open standards / open data / open cloud / open hardware / open exhibits
• Reuse in OSS
• OSS for entertainment
• OSS for education
• Architecture and design of OSS

Economic / organizational / social issues on OSS

• Economic analysis of OSS
• Business models of OSS
• Maturity models of OSS
• OSS in public sector
• OSS intellectual property, copyrights and licensing
• Non-Governmental Organizations and OSS

Important Dates (Deadlines)

1. Submissions due: March 9, 2012
2. Workshop proposals: March 16, 2012
3. Panels and tutorials proposals: May 25, 2012
4. Results to authors: April 13, 2012
5. Camera-ready copy due: May 11, 2012
6. Early registration: June 15, 2012

Submission

Upload contributions in PDF format at http://oss2012.org/.

Organization

General Chairs

• Walt Scacchi, University of California, Irvine, USA
• Tommi Mikkonen, Tampere University of Technology, Finland

Program Chairs

• Imed Hammouda, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
• Björn Lundell, University of Skövde, Sweden

Local Organizing Chairs

• Said Ouerghi, University of Manouba, Tunisia
• Khaled Sammoud, University of Tunis el Manar, Tunisia

Call for Papers 征稿启事

The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) is the premium international conference covering all areas of object technology and related software development technologies. ECOOP 2012 will take place from 11-16 June, 2012 in Beijing, China — only the second time ECOOP has been held outside Europe. ECOOP 2012 embraces a broad range of topics related to object-orientation, including:

• Analysis and design methods and patterns
• Databases, persistence, transactions
• Concurrent, parallel, distributed, mobile, and real-time systems
• Empirical and application studies
• Frameworks, product lines, software architectures
• Language design and implementation
• Modularity, aspects, features, components, services, reflection
• Software development environments and tools
• Static and dynamic software analysis, testing, and metrics
• Theoretical foundations, type systems, formal methods
• Versioning, compatibility, software evolution

ECOOP 2012 solicits high quality submissions describing original and unpublished results. Papers will be evaluated according to originality and significance, precision and correctness, presentation and clarity, and relevance. Incremental improvements over previously published work should have been evaluated through systematic, comparative, empirical or experimental evaluation. Submissions of papers describing groundbreaking approaches to emerging problems will be considered based on timeliness and potential impact.

Only papers that have not been published and are not under review for publication elsewhere may be submitted. Double submissions will be rejected without review. Authors are required to disclose prior publication (formal or informal) of parts of the paper submitted to ECOOP or of closely related papers. Such prior publications must be cited and their relationship to the current submission explained. Authors are also required to inform the ECOOP 2012 program chair about closely related work submitted to another conference while the ECOOP submission is under review.

Submissions will be carried out electronically via CyberChair. Papers must be written in English, and be no longer than 25 pages, including references, appendices and figures, and written using the LNCS style. For more information about formatting please consult the Springer LNCS web site at http://www.springer.com. Clearly marked additional appendices, not intended for the final publication, containing supporting proofs, analyses, statistics, etc, may be included beyond the 25 page limit. The paper must stand alone, however, and reviewers are under no obligation to read any additional appendices. Reviewers are more likely to consult additional appendices rather than separate technical reports. ECOOP papers will be reviewed by the programme committee and additional expert reviewers: authors will have the opportunity to respond to reviews before the programme committee meeting.

For ECOOP 2012, submissions that have been submitted but not accepted by previous prestigious conferences (such as ECOOP, OOPSLA, POPL, PLDI, ICSE, or AOSD) may additionally submit a Note to Reviewers. The Note to Reviewers should a) identify the previous venue(s) (e.g. ECOOP’2011, OOPSLA’2010); b) list the major issues identified by the reviews at those venues; and c) describe the changes made to the paper in response to those reviews.

Important dates 重要日期

Submission deadline

17 December 2011, 23:59 (Samoa)

Author rebuttals

13-14 February 2012

Acceptance notification

29 February 2012

More information

For more information, see the ECOOP 2012 website.

Call for Contributions (SPLC 2012)

We invite the following classes of contributions:

1. Research papers: (max. 10 pages, 5 for short papers) describe original research contributions (theoretical, conceptual) to the field of software product line engineering. We also call for short research papers, which are intended to report ideas in their early stages. Submission deadline: Feb. 20th, 2012.
2. Industrial papers: (max. 10 pages for full, 5 for short papers) describe experience in introducing, implementing and evolving product lines and success stories or problem reports of applications of product line engineering methods, techniques and tools in industry. Submission deadline: Feb. 20th, 2012. All research and full industry papers will be included in the conference proceedings, which will be published through the ACM Digital Library.
3. Workshops: The purpose of the workshop program is to provide a forum for bringing together people from industry, academia, and research institutions to present and discuss research results and practices. Workshops should be organized as full-day events. Submission deadline: March 1st, 2012.
4. Tutorials: Tutorials will be held during the conference week in full-day or half-day sessions. A tutorial proposal consists of two pages describing the topic, the plan for conducting the tutorial, and the backgrounds of the presenters and the tutorial. We explicitly invite tutorials that have been held at other events. Submission deadline: March 1st, 2012.
5. Submissions to Hall of Fame: Each SPLC culminates with a session in which members of the audience nominate systems for induction into the Software Product Line Hall of Fame. Those nominations feed discussions about what constitutes excellence and success in product lines. More information on nominations and election can be found at the conference website or at http://www.splc.net/fame.html
6. Demonstrations and Tools: Demonstrations show the application of novel product line engineering concepts and techniques in practice. The demonstration with realistic use cases is encouraged. Submission deadline: April 30th, 2012.
7. Doctoral Symposium: The Doctoral Symposium gives doctoral students the opportunity to discuss their research plans with experienced members of the community. Submission deadline: May 18th, 2012.

Further information regarding the submission processes and submission dates can be found in the separate calls on the website http://www.splc2012.net/ We invite you to be part of SPLC!

Information regarding sponsoring can be found on the website.

For further information please contact contact@splc2012.net.

Modern organizations rely on complex configurations of distributed IT systems that implement key business processes, provide databases, data warehousing, and business intelligence. The current business environment requires organizations to comply with a range of externally defined regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and BASEL II.

Organizations need to be increasingly agile, robust, and be able to react to complex events, possibly in terms of dynamic reconfiguration.

In order to satisfy these complex requirements, large organizations are increasingly using Enterprise Modelling (EM) technologies to analyze their business units, processes, resources and IT systems, and to show how these elements satisfy the goals of the business. EM describes all aspects of the construction and analysis of organizational models and supports enterprise use cases including:

• Business Alignment: elements of a business are shown to meet its goals.
• Business Change Management: as-is and to-be models are used to plan how a business is to be changed.
• Governance and Compliance: models are used to show that processes are in place to comply with regulations.
• Acquisitions and Mergers: models are used to analyze the effect of combining two or more businesses.
• Enterprise Resource Planning: models are used to analyze the use of resources within a business and to show that given quality criteria are achieved.

Emerging technologies, methods and techniques currently proposed for EM include:

• Modelling Languages: including UML; SysML; ArchiMate; MODAF; TOGAF.
• Enterprise Views: stakeholder identification; multiple linguistic communities.
• Enterprise Patterns: an organization is shown to conform to general (possibly executable) organizational principles.
• Event Driven Architectures: constructing enterprise architectures based on complex events.
• Enterprise Simulation: executing configurations of organizational units in order to analyse and verify performance.

General Author Information

The Journal of Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) invites original, high-quality submissions for its theme issue on Enterprise Modelling  (EM). The aim of the theme issue is to bring together a collection of articles that describe a range of EM technologies and approaches in order to provide the reader with a single resource that captures the state of art. The theme issue will include an introduction to the field, an overview of the leading-edge languages and technologies used to undertake EM, and in-depth analysis of techniques or approaches for specific use-cases of EM.

Papers must be written in a scientifically rigorous manner with adequate references to related work.

Submitted papers must not be simultaneously submitted in an extended form or in a shortened form to other journals or conferences. It is however possible to submit extended versions of previously published work if less than 75% of the content already appeared in a non-journal publication, or less than 40% in a journal publication. Please see the SoSyM Policy Statement on Plagiarism for further conditions.

Submitted papers do not need to adhere to a particular format or page limit, but should be prepared using font “Times New Roman” with a font size no smaller than 11 pt, and with 1.5 line spacing. Please consult the SoSyM author information for submitting papers.

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three reviewers.

Communicate your intent to submit a paper by emailing the theme issue editors the following information before the Intent to Submit deadline: Title, Authors, and an Abstract.

Prepare your submission with either Word or LaTeX using Word and LaTeX templates. Possible submission formats are:

• Word (.doc, without macros)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• PostScript (.ps, special fonts must be embedded)
• PDF (saved as readable in version 5.0 or later)

Submit your work using the online system manuscript central:

• In step 1, select “Special Section Paper” as the manuscript type and select “Dr. Bernhard Rumpe” as the “Editor-in-Chief” (EIC).
• In step 4, add: Balbir Barn (+  b.barn@mdx.ac.uk), Alan Brown (+ awbrown@us.ibm.com), Tony Clark (+  t.n.clark@ mdx.ac.uk) or  Florian Matthes (+  matthes@in.tum.de)  as an editor and choose “Designate as Preferred Editor”.
• In step 5, make sure field “Cover Letter” includes the line: “Submission for Theme Issue on EM”.

If you have any questions about this theme issue, please contact the editors.

Editors

Balbir Barn
b.barn@mdx.ac.uk
Middlesex University, UK

Alan Brown
awbrown@us.ibm.com
IBM Software Group

Tony Clark
t.n.clark@mdx.ac.uk
Middlesex University, UK

Florian Matthes
matthes@in.tum.de
TU München, Germany 

Editors-in-Chief

Robert France
Colorado State University

Bernhard Rumpe
RWTH Aachen University

Important Dates

• Intent to submit: 01 Sep  11
• Paper submission: 01 Nov 11
• Notification: 01 Feb 12
• Publication: 2012

How and Why IT User Companies Sponsor Open Source

Abstract: Open source is not only a type of software, it is also a novel development and inter-firm collaboration model. IT user companies can use this collaboration model to counter increasing costs and undesired vendor lock-in. An increasing number of IT user companies in various industries are sponsoring open source and are creating open source user foundations to achieve these goals. This talk introduces the concept of open source user foundations and, using current examples, explains how existing IT user companies are working towards the goal of better controlling their IT destiny.

English Table of Contents

• Open source definition, time-line
• Professionalization of open source
• Current open source foundations
• Goals, core processes, governance
• Intellectual property arrangements
• Known dysfunctions and problems
• A blueprint for open source user foundations
• General model of open source user foundations
• Best practices and choices vs key levers and customizations
• A comparison of existing open source user foundations

Warum und Wie IT-Anwenderunternehmen Open Source Unterstützen

Zusammenfassung: Open Source bezeichnet nicht nur eine Art von Software, sondern stellt auch eine neuartige Methode der Softwareentwicklung und Kooperation zwischen Unternehmen dar. IT-Anwenderunternehmen können dieses Kooperationsmodell nutzen, um steigenden Kosten und unerwünschtem Vendor-Lock-In erfolgreich zu begegnen. Um diese Ziele zu erreichen, unterstützen IT-Anwenderunternehmen unterschiedlichster Branchen Open-Source-Software und gründen Open-Source-Anwendervereinigungen. Dieser Vortrag stellt das Konzept solcher Vereinigungen (Foundations, Konsortien) vor und erläutert unter Verwendung aktueller Beispiele, wie existierende IT-Anwenderunternehmen Open Source unterstützen und Anwendervereinigungen nutzen, um Ihre IT-Zukunft aktiver und erfolgreicher zu gestalten.

Deutsche Inhaltsangabe

• Open-Source-Definition, Zeitstrahl
• Die Professionalisierung von Open Source
• Heutige Open-Source-Vereinigungen
• Ziele, Prozesse, Governance
• Umgang mit geistigem Eigentum
• Dysfunktionen und Probleme
• Eine Blaupause für Open-Source-Anwendervereinigungen
• Ein allgemeines Modell von Open-Source-Anwendervereinigungen
• Erfahrungen, Erfolgsmethoden und Stellschrauben
• Ein Vergleich existierender Open-Source-Anwendervereinigungen

So what about this “cracking the MediaWiki code”?

Wikipedia aims to bring the (encyclopedic) knowledge of the world to all of us, for free. While already ten years old, the Wikipedia community is just getting started, and we have barely seen the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more to come. All that wonderful content is being written by volunteers using a (seemingly) simple language called Wikitext (the stuff you type in once you click on edit). Until today, Wikitext had been poorly defined.

There was no grammar, no defined processing rules, and no defined output like a DOM tree based on a well defined document object model. This is to say, the content of Wikipedia is stored in a format that is not an open standard. The format is defined by 5000 lines of php code (the parse function of MediaWiki). That code may be open source, but it is incomprehensible to most. That’s why there are 30+ failed attempts at writing alternative parsers. That’s why a respected long-time community member asked in exasperation: Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

The common answer given is to hide the complexity of Wikitext behind a visual editor, but that is not an answer. It doesn’t work: A visual editor, like any other algorithm that wants to work with Wikipedia content, needs a well-understood specification of the language that content is written in. This is where the Sweble parser comes in. Following well-understood computer science best practices, it uses a well-defined grammar that a parser generator uses to create a parser. It uses well-understood object-oriented design patterns (the Visitor pattern, prominently) to build a processing pipeline that transforms source Wikitext into whatever the desired output format is. And most importantly, it defines an abstract syntax tree (AST), document object model (DOM) tree soon, and works off that tree. We have come a long way from 5000 lines of php code.

So what does creating an AST and DOM tree for Wikitext buy us?

In short, it buys us interoperability and evolvability. In a 2007 paper, using the then hopeful wiki markup community standard WikiCreole, we explained the need for such interoperability and evolvability as defined by an open standard. Different tools can gather around that format and evolve independently. Today, everything has to go lock-step with MediaWiki. By untying the content and data from MediaWiki, we are enabling an ecosystem of tools and technology around Wikipedia (and related project) content so these projects can gain more speed and breadth.

• Tsinghua University on March 17th, 2011
• Peking University on March 18th, 2011
• University of Macau on April 1st, 2011

After that it’s back to Germany.