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

Keywords: Wiki, Wikipedia, Wiki Parser, Wikitext Parser, Parsing Expression Grammar, PEG, Abstract Syntax Tree, AST, WYSIWYG, Sweble.

Reference: Hannes Dohrn and Dirk Riehle. “Design and Implementation of the Sweble Wikitext Parser: Unlocking the Structured Data of Wikipedia.” In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym 2011). ACM Press, 2011.

The paper is available as a PDF file (preprint).

Keywords: Wiki, Wikipedia, Wikitext, Wikitext Parser, Open Source, Sweble, Mediawiki, Mediawiki Parser, XWML, HTML, WOM

Reference: Hannes Dohrn and Dirk Riehle. WOM: An Object Model for Wikitext. University of Erlangen, Technical Report CS-2011-05 (July 2011).

The technical report is available as a PDF file.

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.

October 3-5, 2011 | Mountain View, California

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.

• Original call for papers
• Symposium and program committee
• Symposium website

Submissions are invited for the following categories:

• Research Papers, Panels, Workshop: April 1
• Posters, Demos: May 13
• Notification of Acceptance: June 17

The conference program will include a peer-reviewed research track, as well as workshops, a doctoral consortium, invited keynotes and panel speakers. Evening social events will follow, because wiki folks know the value of a good party for sparking conversation and collaboration. As always, 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.

Topics appropriate for research 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 open resources in specific fields, such as
  • Education/Open Educational Resources
  • Law/Intellectual Property
  • Journalism
  • Art
  • Science
  • Publishing
  • Business
  • Entertainment

In addition to research and development topics, WikiSym also invites innovative proposals for wiki-style art and performance.

Submissions Guidelines

The submissions website will be opened in late February 2011; check back for the link.

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

Research papers present integrative reviews or original reports of substantive new work: theoretical, empirical, 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.

Accepted submissions will be published in the WikiSym proceedings and archived in the ACM Digital Library. Submitted papers should use the ACM SIG Proceedings Format, see: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

Workshops

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.

A workshop proposal should consist of approximately two pages describing 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, 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

Panels provide an interactive forum for bringing together people with interesting points of view to discuss compelling wiki issues. Panels involve participation from both the panelists and audience members in a lively discussion. Proposals for panels should consist of approximately two pages describing what you intend to do and how your session will meet the criteria described above. It should include a concise abstract and one-paragraph biographies of panelists and moderators. A panel submission will be reviewed and selected for their interest to the community. Each panel will be given a 90-minute time slot.

Posters

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. Submissions should consist of a two-page extended abstract outlining the content of the poster and should be submitted in the ACM SIG Proceedings Format, see: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Successful applicants will be invited display a poster, up to 1x2m in size, at a special plenary session of the Symposium.

Demos

No format is better suited for demonstrating the utility of new collaboration tools technology than showing and using it. If you would like to demonstrate new features or products, this is the place! Demonstrations give presenters an opportunity to show running systems and gather feedback. Demo submissions will be reviewed based on their relevance to the community. A submission should be one page in length, with a title and a short description of the demo. The description should include 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 may be included.

Doctoral Symposium

The Doctoral Symposium is a day-long research-focused meeting and mentoring session of a group of 8-15 selected Ph.D. candidates and four distinguished research faculty. Applications are encouraged from all doctoral students doing work related to open collaboration, regardless of the discipline in which they are earning their Ph.D. We encourage participation from a broad range of relevant disciplines and approaches, including (but not limited to) computer science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, information science, cognitive science, rhetoric, communications, and economics. All PhD students may apply to the Doctoral Consortium; however, preference is given to applicants who have conducted enough research to understand how his or her work fits within the research field, how to conduct research, and how to present it effectively.

Application details will appear here in spring 2011. If you have questions, please contact doctoral symposium chair, Loren Terveen (terveen(AT)cs.umn.edu).

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.

From what I can tell, companies are shying away from bringing commercial innovation and investment to MediaWiki because of the uncertainty around its intellectual property. I recently talked with a consulting firm that intends to provide services and extensions to MediaWiki. Extension is the MediaWiki term for plug-in, that is program code separate from the main project code but that is executed together with it. When they asked their lawyers whether they could create and sell proprietary extensions to MediaWiki they received a lawyerly “maybe”, which left them wondering whether it would be wise to bank on MediaWiki.

MediaWiki uses the GPLv2 (and later) license family. Whether the GPL applies to extensions has been answered by the community a couple of times with a not-so-resounding “probably not”. Thus, software firms are somewhat left guessing as to the legal situation and the intentions of the MediaWiki development community. Being able to decide on your own when you want to open source or keep something proprietary, however, is key to engaging software firms and creating commercial investment and innovation.

At WikiSym 2010 I talked to a lot of Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) folks. The WMF operates Wikipedia and is the caretaker of MediaWiki. From these discussions I know that the WMF guys want commercial innovation around MediaWiki and are not at all fundamentalists about open-sourcing everything that touches MediaWiki. So here is what I think needs to happen if we want to see MediaWiki benefit from commercial innovation and have it make inroads into the enterprise:

• Exception clause. There must be legal certainty as to whether extensions/plugins can be kept proprietary. The way to go is a clearly defined exception clause to the GPL that covers extensions. It must be safe for a firm to innovate and keep the fruits of their labor for a while. I don’t worry about not sharing: In most cases, competitors and community will catch-up fast enough so that nobody will keep software proprietary for too long.
• Trademarks and other IP. The term “MediaWiki” is important from a marketing perspective due to spill-over effects from Wikipedia. Thus it must be crystal-clear under what circumstances a software firm can use this term in its marketing outreach. The usual solution is to create a foundation, say, the MediaWiki Foundation, which becomes the caretaker of the trademark and other IP, and in which commercial entities can have a stake. [1]

The second bullet item suggests the creation of a MediaWiki Foundation. One may wonder whether the Wikimedia Foundation can play this role. I wouldn’t advise this, because conflict of interest resolution would be difficult in such a setup. The primary mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to steer and operate a specific set of services, and MediaWiki is just the software being used for it. If firms would always fear having to bow to WMF interests when the going gets tough, they’d stay away from the get-go, as they are doing today.

Another alternative would be to transfer rights to a software foundation like the Free Software Foundation (due to GPL) or maybe the Apache Software Foundation if folks were to consider a license change. These foundations are experienced in handling conflicts and might be good caretakers. On the other hand, as the Drupal Foundation shows by comparison, MediaWiki may well be important enough to warrant its own foundation.

[1] Eugene Kim pointed out to me the Wikimedia Foundation trademark policy, which covers WMF trademarks. MediaWiki seems to play only a minor role only, though.

The Paper & Short Paper Deadline is July 3.

ACM CHIMIT ’10

Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology

November 12-13, 2010, San Jose, CA (co-located with USENIX LISA in San Jose)

Since 2007, CHIMIT has been the leading forum for discussing topics on IT management with a focus on people, business, and technology. At CHIMIT, researchers and practitioners share issues, solutions, and research drawing upon fields such as human-computer interaction, human factors, collaborative work, computer systems, and management and service sciences to address cognitive, social, and technical issues in managing the increasing complexity of modern Information Technology (IT) systems.

Information Technology (IT) is central to modern life. From our homes to our largest enterprises, we are surrounded by software and hardware components that support our work and personal lives: wireless access points, network routers, firewalls, virus scanners, databases, web servers, storage and backup systems, etc. These components exist to permit us to do other things, e.g., manage inventory, communicate with friends or customers, sell products through websites, yet all too often managing the underlying IT infrastructure takes time and resources away from the real work at hand. IT systems have grown increasingly complex over the years, and the cost for keeping the infrastructure running is now a significant burden. We are at a turning point where further advances in technology and business efficiency and growth require fundamentally new approaches to IT system design, management, and services.

CHIMIT is an ACM-sponsored conference, and accepted Paper and Short Paper submissions will be archived in the ACM Digital Library. Topics include (but are not limited to):

• User Studies of IT infrastructure management in context, exposing user needs, pain points, work practices, and examples of both successful and unsuccessful work.
• Design – approaches to bring about improved, human-centered IT systems.
• Experimental Studies on the usage of new or existing IT systems.
• Tools and Techniques for improved administration, e.g., visualizations of system behavior, or collaborative interfaces.
• Automation approaches to reduce administration workload or improve productivity.
• Computer supported cooperative work – how do those who manage an organization’s IT interact with the users they support, their technical community, and other stakeholders?
• Organizational Knowledge – how can shared knowledge improve IT management.
• Processes and Practices – examples of best practices and improved processes in IT management.
• New Technologies – how will the changing technological landscape (e.g., Cloud Computing, pervasive mobile devices, etc.) affect IT management?
• IT Beyond the Enterprise – what are the implications now that we’re doing backups, network configuration, etc. in the home?

Submission Dates

• July 3, 2010: Papers and Short Papers Due
• August 7, 2010: Panels and Courses Due
• September 17, 2010: Selections announced
• September 24, 2010: Posters Due
• October 1, 2010: Poster selections announced

The overarching goal of my group’s research is to comprehensively define “the next big” software development method. To that end, we will work to unify agile software development methods with open source software development. Agile methods can cope with changing requirements but don’t scale up well. Open source methods can cope with changing requirements and also scale up well. However, open source remains poorly understood as a development method and practices vary significantly from project to project. Agile methods are increasingly being adopted in the enterprise, but it is open source methods that innovate intra- and inter-company collaboration as well as vendor-customer relationships. Given prior significant research on agile methods, the focus of my group’s work will be on understanding open source methods and practices in both an engineering and a business context.

1. Engineering practices. What makes an open source project succeed? What are best practices of distributed configuration management? How to prioritize feature requests in a community setting? Our engineering practices research will address these and related questions, seeking to develop a comprehensive and validated toolbox of open source best practices. The primary research approach is to generate data-driven hypotheses of how open source practices work, to develop new tools based on the newly defined practices, to experiment with these practices using a software forge, and to validate the refined practices definition. In a typical dissertation, the initially analytical hypothesis generation will be followed-up on by substantial open source software development. Examples of such publications are [1], [2], [3], [4].
2. Single-vendor open source. As the MySQL exit illustrates, open source can be a highly effective and disruptive business strategy, even in a market as established and as conservative as relational databases. Self-sustaining open source communities can help a vendor build a superior product faster and cheaper; in turn the community receives a free-to-use open source project. Beyond engineering practices, open source vendors engage in various business practices to go to market with the open source product. We will investigate and define these business practices and the underlying open source strategies. For this research, we are likely to collaborate with industry partners as well as economics and information systems departments. An example publication is [5].
3. Community open source. In community(-owned) open source projects, software vendors and individual developers come together alike, sometimes for altruistic reasons, sometimes driven by an indirect profit motive. How to develop software if there is no superior to tell you how it is? How much money and labor to invest into community projects like the Eclipse platform? What’s the return on investment for a strategic non-profit member? The answers to these questions mesh engineering with business practices research. They will inform public policy making as the common good created through community open source may need public seed funding. We will approach these questions in collaboration with the respective foundations, their members, and economics researchers. An example publication is [6].

In most cases, as part of a Ph.D. thesis’ validation, I will require software development. Thus, some work, certainly on engineering practices research, will entail substantial software engineering. This is not only supported but desired by the University, which would like to see research not only to be published in the best conferences and journals, but also to be of significant industrial relevance. The professorship is set up to make it easy to turn dissertation work into (open source) startups, and I’ll be actively supporting this. Application domains of immediate interest to me are software development tools, business applications in the cloud, and social software, in particular wikis. I’m also interested in mobile devices, multimedia, and medical technology.

If you are interested in these topics and would like to perform Ph.D. level work, please contact me.

References

[1] Dirk Riehle, John Ellenberger, Tamir Menahem, Boris Mikhailovski, Yuri Natchetoi, Barak Naveh, Thomas Odenwald. “Open Collaboration within Corporations Using Software Forges.” IEEE Software, vol. 26, no. 2 (March/April 2009). Page 52-58.

[2] Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle. “The Total Growth of Open Source.” In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2008). Springer Verlag, 2008. Page 197-209.

[3] Philipp Hofmann, Dirk Riehle. “Estimating Commit Sizes Efficiently.” In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2009). Springer Verlag, 2009. Page 105-115.

[4] Oliver Arafat, Dirk Riehle. “The Commit Size Distribution of Open Source Software.” In Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 42). IEEE Press, 2009. Page 1-8.

[5] Dirk Riehle. “The Commercial Open Source Business Model.” In Proceedings of the 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2009). AIS Electronic Library, 2009. Paper 104.

[6] Dirk Riehle. “The Economic Motivation of Open Source: Stakeholder Perspectives.” IEEE Computer, vol. 40, no. 4 (April 2007). Page 25-32.

The professorship is well-funded and I’ll be seeking to hire Ph.D. students right away. For my research plans, please see the upcoming blog post. For now, I’ll let my favorite (ex-)Stanford comic strip do the talking. If you aren’t reading Ph.D. comics yet, check it out.