Yes yes, I know this already happened months ago … I’m just sometimes very very slooow to get around to putting things on my blog.

Wikimania 2007 wrap-up: constructive criticism, random comments, and a few photos.

Firstly, if you get a chance to go to Wikimania, then you really should go – you’ll have a really great time. I have only been to this one, but the Taipei organisers were amazing – they were very friendly, amazingly helpful, and the facilities with the lecture rooms being so close to the accommodation and so close to the dining areas and all with an ATM and convenience store nearby, was just superb, and all the touches (e.g. the power cables everywhere) were just great, and the other attendees were lots of fun.

Eric recently wrote a good summary of Wikimania, and towards the end invited some constructive criticism. Well, here are my thoughts on a few things that would have made an amazingly good conference even better, although most of this overlaps with wishlist comments that other people have made:

• Double-sided name badges, so that you can always read someone’s name. I lost count of the number of times I flipped over someone’s name badge, or they flipped over mine.
• More wireless microphones so that panels and getting audience input is easier.
• Maybe try some Meraki mesh routers for wireless networking, as per Gerard M’s suggestion.
• Include a notepad and pen in the conference bag so that people can take old-school notes.
• A survey form, to gather feedback at the end of the conference. Example questions: Which talks did people like the most? What things worked well at the conference? What things didn’t work so well? What or who would you like to see at Wikimania?
• Improve the online video experience for people who can’t be there. (Walter raised this point previously):
  • Background: No matter where you hold Wikimania, it’s a given that large numbers of people will not be able to attend. Now, I must point out that other volunteer-run conferences (like linux.conf.au) have the exact same problem with videos – their volunteers record videos with the best of intentions of putting of them online, neatly labeled by talk, in an open format. During the conference there’s no time to do this though, because there are fires that have to put out, talks to attend, people to meet, parties to go to – so post-processing and uploading the videos gets pushed back to “later”. Then the conference ends, the attendees go home, and the volunteers who have worked their-asses-off start to think about reconnecting with their friends / family / work, with the best of intentions of doing it some time later. But after a few weeks, it hasn’t happened, and it probably never will. It doesn’t really work, and the only time I’ve seen it done really well was at http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2007/video/ , but that required an amazing and probably unreasonable amount of work from the organizers, and even then not all of the videos were labeled with obvious names.
  • So my suggestion is this: Take some of the money that would normally go towards getting people to the conference (e.g. $1000 or $2000 would probably fly 2 or 3 people to the conference), and instead put that towards paying A/V non-wikipedians to do all the post-processing and labeling and uploading of videos, as soon as possible after the videos are recorded, and give them part of the money only after it’s done. That way, sure, you get slightly fewer people attending which sucks a bit, but suddenly many more people can participate, even if they cannot physically be there, which more than makes up for it.

And now some random comments:

• The “Truth in Numbers” documentary from Nic Hill will finish filming short after the end of Wikimania 2007. He showed a preview at the party (held at the end of the second day). The audience had been chatting for a while, and had quite a few beers, and so was getting a bit vocal. So what was interesting is that when the video was show, people would cheer or boo, depending on who or what was being shown. They booed at the bit about Chinese Internet censorship – as did I. They also booed at Larry Sanger when there was a clip with a quote from him. Now, I have never met the guy, but I do think he’s getting a bit of a raw deal. What he was saying was intelligent, his point was valid, and I for one am glad that Citizendium exists. Currently I don’t use it, but the fact it exists at all as a competitor is a good thing. So please, cut the guy some slack.
• Location of the next or future Wikimanias. (Note: Alexandria was picked for 2008 recently, so some of this stuff is now out of date!) Of course there’s a bidding process for selecting this, but people love to speculate and make wild guesses about locations. And why not, as a bit of pointless fun? So here were some of the places bandied about as possibilities for next or future years:
  • Alexandria: This would be close to Europe, be convenient for the Middle East and accessible to members of the Arabic & Hebrew Wikipedias. However it would be hot.
  • Australia: People said to the Australians “when are you guys going to host this?” I said “but the weather in Australia in August sucks! It’s cold, and it can be rainy.” But paradoxically, this just made people even keener – 2006 and 2007 were really hot, so a cool / cold location actually confers brownie points (Average temperature range shown here – 9 to 17 degrees Celsius average in August) … And whilst I would love to have Wikimania in Australia, having seen it first-hand, the effort involved in running and organising this is just huge! All the organisers of this have been absolutely amazing, and I look at what they have done and think “wow, that’s a metric tonne of work … dunno if I could handle that!” Brianna L seemed to have had similar concerns. So the current plan is give it some time, and to bid for Wikimania in 2010, and if we get it (and hopefully even if we don’t) to have a local Australian + NZ Wikimania in 2009 (probably in Canberra) to give us some practice and to put to some faces to names, and to get together in a way that is hard to in a large country.
  • South America: Gets you southern hemisphere + cool, plus sounds like they have an enthusiastic bid team.
  • London: Covers Europe, is accessible from the US, has a strong community. (Possible downside: expensive). But, as a bonus, the devs could have the Hacking Days at Rob Church’s flat / house. Just rock up. Uninvited. No more excuses from him about not turning up – just take it to him. :-)
  • Helsinki was also mentioned.
  • Bidding for the next Wikimania: Will probably have bids for the next 2 or maybe 3 in quicker succession (maybe two months or so apart) – so 2008, 2009, and maybe 2010 will possibly be bid for within the next 6 months. Benefit of that is that people can plan and organise sponsors; also allows people to learn.
• The breakfasts were in a dining hall, held from 7:00 to 8:30 AM. And between 8:20 AM and 8:29 AM a large number of Wikipedians would arrive (including myself, usually at 8:29), just scraping in before the cut-off, no doubt to the annoyance of the kitchen staff. Definite Wikipedian <–> slacker correlation somewhere in there. Or maybe that’s just me :-)
• Laptop fashion: Most popular laptops brands among Wikimania attendees were by far and away both Apple laptops & IBM ThinkPads. Having stickers for Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Firefox, Wikimania, and so forth stuck to the lid also brought bonus points, and a conundrum for the Apple owners: Do you add stickers, thus potentially ruining the sleek white plastic or polished metal exterior, but conferring status points? And if yes, do you cover the glowing Apple logo? Oh, these must be difficult and vexing questions indeed! :-)
• Speaking of laptops, man, I wish I had bought a laptop in Taiwan. Shops were selling IBM / Lenovo X61 ThinkPad laptops (1 Gig RAM, 120 Gig HDD, Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 Santa Rosa processor, nice slim form factor) for TWD$38,000, which is equivalent to AUD$1330. I checked the price for the same model when I got back to Australia, and it’s locally around AUD$3100 (i.e. it was only 42% of the price in Taiwan). For that difference, I could quite happily learn to ignore the Chinese meta-characters on the keyboard.
• Tip for people planning on attending Wikimania: take lots of business cards. I took about 15 (which I thought would be plenty), but actually about 30 would have been the right number.

And lastly a few photos:

Wikipedians buying fruit at the night markets:

Whacky Taiwanese zoo sign: “It’s okay to wave at the Panda Bear, but riding him like a racehorse will make him sad.”

Yuri being pandered, after falling asleep in a massage chair.

Lodewijk takes the Starbucks versus Starbucks-imitator challenge. Starbucks won.

Chaos as people tore the wiki ball apart. Sadly, nobody burst out of the ball.

Delphine and Cormac jokingly go head-to-head: Taiwanese toys at 50 paces!

Discussion notes: “Wikimedia Board Plenary Session”
Present: Frieda, Erik Moller, Jimmy Wales, Florence, Kat Walsh, Jean-Bart.

Normally 7 board members, 4 elected and 3 appointed.
Florence / Anthere joined in 2002 on EN and FR. Joined board in 2004. Chairperson.
Kat – Law student, US based, free culture.
Erik – from Berlin, Germany. Was journalist & writer. Concerned about managing potential of volunteers to do what they think is necessary. Most tech-focussed member.
Frieda – Italian, joined 2002, in 2005 was one the founders of the Italian Wikimedia chapter. Was elected a few weeks ago.

Q: Are you happy with the mix of non-elected and elected board members?
A: Most happy with having some appointed people. Erik would prefer all members to be elected.

Q: Print on demand. Any more details? Will we be able to get PDFs for free?
A: Want to make available to other wiki installations. Don’t want to get into specific details, want to avoid a vapor-ware situation. Working with a German company for this. [More info and some source code was released recently, several weeks after this session].

Q: How should people address the board? How do people communicate with the board?
A: “I dunno.” :-) Join the mailing lists, join the local chapters. Need the community members to push things to make them happen, because the board gets so overloaded. There are many things they would like to do, but they are only 7 people. Post-script: Contact: Cary Bass: User name: Bastique, has been hired by the foundation to be the volunteer co-ordinator.

Q: What do you think are some of the highest priority items?
A:

• Frieda: More communication.
• Erik: Organising volunteers and co-ordination volunteers.
• Jimmy: Building infrastructure of the organisation, organisational structure, to take advantage of opportunities.
• Kat: Organisational structure, less crises.
• Jean-Bart: Lowering the barriers to entry.
• Ant/Florence: Usability, explaining our values.

Talk by Joi Ito – “The Sharing Economy”.

Wants to have the .wiki TLD. Interested in the blogging revolution. Creative commons licenses.

We are very difficult as an audience! Very varied level of knowledge. Audience will argue back.

The Internet: “The Stupid Network” – David Isenberg (used in a paper); “Small pieces loosely joined” – David Weineberger (used in a book).

Internet created by small teams connecting together. When the Internet fails, it’s usually because of large companies and governments. The innovation is best when it is small pieces. Free software works because the cost of failure is very low – this allows ideas that would normally not be tried in large companies. E.g. Google was most exciting when it was small, and most innovative when it was small.

Professional versus Amateur:

• The era of the professional had a large barrier to entry… We began to associate professional = good. Professionals are paid.
• Amateur derives from the word “to love” – doing something because you love it. In English the perception is that amateur = low quality. There is a mismatch here.

Economists – think the more money you have, the happier you are. Utility function. The idea that you are trying to earn as much money as possible. People in the financial business associate intelligence with money. Yet often people are motivated more by factors that don’t have anything to do with money.

Also there is a difference between pleasure and happiness:

Pleasure:

• Drugs
• Gambling
• Winning lotto
• Good weather

You can buy pleasure. We adjust to and quickly get used to pleasure.

Happiness:

• More than enough is too much.
• Comes from compassion – giving and receiving love.

You cannot buy happiness.

Amateurs make decisions based on happiness. Professionals maybe more based on pleasure.

Pirates:

• Hollywood oversimplifies (Shock! Horror!). Pirates sometimes are not stealing; they are in fact fans that are addressing a need that is not being made (e.g localisations that don’t exist; movies which they simply cannot buy in their region).

There is a culture gap:

• Remix – combining pre-existing material in new and interesting ways
• E.g. the grey album (black album + the white album)
• We are currently stifling free speech of remixing video.

Unregulated uses of things, like books – things can currently do:

• Read
• Sell
• Sleep on a book
• Burn a book
• Fair use (tiny little grey zone)

Mostly only people who were copying a book and selling it were triggering copyright law.
Most uses of books are free, and unregulated.
Most regulated uses were commercial.

There is a big difference when we go from analogue to digital. Suddenly we are triggering copyright law all the time, because with digital material things get copied ALL the time, and indeed NEED to be copied to work. E.g. a DVD is copied into memory to be displayed; a web site’s pages are copied over the network and into memory when it is displayed in your browser. In the digital world, copies are EVERYWHERE and are REQUIRED for it to work.

Law + Technology = DRM.

Amazon is saying things like “let’s charge per page or per view”.

Now people are saying, “let’s charge second hand book stores”. It’s a creeping form of greed. Companies are not about happiness, they are about money.

There are also people who want “no rights reserved”

Creative commons is in between these two ends of the spectrum.

Creative commons = “Open source for content”. It’s also a “user interface for copyright”.

CC non-commercial no-derivatives is NOT a free license – how can you say it’s free when there are so many restrictions and regulations?

http://creativecommons.org/ – can take this into court – has a legal code. Can add metadata to material to indicate the license restrictions.

http://ccmixter.org/

With the Internet, want it to be open – it’s GOOD that your enemies and people you don’t agree with can use the Internet – it makes it a much more interesting place and a more useful thing.

Ensemble. The importance of diversity. How a few negative comments can damage group cohesion. How to get different people with very different backgrounds to work together. A sense of unity and shared purpose. A lot of this ensemble gets lost in mailing lists and IRC and the minutia of day-to-day remote stuff – it’s why conferences and get-together are so valuable.

People who work in an online community care about the rules WAY more than people in companies. Most employees will never read their company rules, or comment on them. Studies have found that paradoxically, places with more rules tend to have happier people (because people know where they stand and what’s acceptable). (Personal comment: There has a be a limit to rules otherwise, like the real legal system, ordinary people will need specialists / lawyers to navigate all the rules. E.g. I’m personal slightly doubtful that more rules and guidelines would be constructive for the English Wikipedia).