WikiMania 2006, Day One

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Day one is over. Brain is overloaded. Very tired. Attending conference during day/evening, then working late into night — bad. Law school dorms with no air conditioning in Cambridge in August — also bad.    (KWO)

Still, much to share. And amazingly enough, I will — at least a bit. There’s something about this conference that actually gets me to blog, rather than simply promising I will. Besides, I’m going to set a new record for responsiveness to Tom Maddox, even if it is via blog.    (KWP)

It is incredibly surreal to be back at my alma mater surrounded by post-college friends and colleagues. What makes it even more surreal is that folks from all facets of my professional life seem to be here, not just Wiki folks. I mentioned having my fingers in a lot of pies, right? Well, all those pies are unexpectedly well represented this weekend. It started yesterday when I discovered that Chris Messina and Tara Hunt were on the same flight to Boston, and culminated at dinner with Greg Elin (whom I first met at the FLOSS Usability Sprint, and who invited me to join him for dinner), Daniel Perry (a lawyer who’s been an important contributor to recent Identity Commons discussions), Tom Munnecke (first introduced to me by Jack Park when I was just starting Blue Oxen Associates), and Doc Searls (who needs no introduction). Also at the dinner: Ellen Miller, Micah Sifry, David Isenberg, Britt Blaser, and Yochai Benkler. Quite a contrast from last year, when I was hanging with grassroots Wiki peeps every night. I’m not complaining, though. The conversation was fascinating, even if we didn’t talk much about Wikis.    (KWQ)

Keeping with this theme, I didn’t hear much about Wikis today, other than my interview with Ward Cunningham. I kept my questions pretty basic, as a lot of folks there had never heard him speak, but I managed to slip in a few probing questions for myself. I asked Ward about the evolution of Wiki culture, and I specifically mentioned the culture of anonymity that he strongly encouraged in the early days, but that seems mostly absent in today’s Wikis. Ward seemed resignedly ambivalent. I asked him about what makes a Wiki a Wiki, and he was decidedly agnostic in his response: anything that facilitates a permissive spirit and mode of collaboration. I’m not sure whether he was being political or whether he truly feels this way. My guess is a bit of both, but I’ll press him on this if I get a chance later this weekend.    (KWR)

I showed up late to Larry Lessig‘s keynote, but I was unconcerned, as I had heard him give his Free Culture speech before. It’s excellent, but he recycles it often. Sure enough, he was doing the same speech, and I started tuning out. Fortunately, my brain was paying partial attention, or I would have missed what may end up being the most intriguing development of the conference.    (KWS)

Larry started talking about the interoperability of licenses, and how it was silly that the FDL and Creative Commons BY-SA licenses could not be relicensed interchangeably, even though the two licenses were equivalent in spirit and intent. He then proposed an interoperability clause as well as a neutral organization whose purpose would be to classify equivalent licenses. His talk was followed by a really good panel discussion between him and Eben Moglen. This stuff is really complicated and important, but it looks like Larry and Eben are serious about working together towards a common solution. Apparently, Jimbo Wales deserves a lot of credit for getting these two to cooperate. Did I mention that I love this community?    (KWT)

Quick hits:    (KWU)

  • I shared a flight and T ride here with Chris Messina aned Tara Hunt. (Chris was presenting on Bar Camp.) Chris extolled the virtues of Voodoo Pad, which apparently has autolinking features a la my Markup Free Auto Linking Wiki idea.    (KWV)
  • Was excited to see two of my roommates from last year: Kurt Jansson, a German doctoral student and president of the German chapter of Wikimedia Foundation, and Juan David Ruiz, a Chilean lawyer.    (KWW)
  • Saw Erik Zachte in the morning, who does awesome Wikipedia work. Erik immediately told me about two cool projects I had never heard of: FON and Wikimapia.    (KWX)
  • Caught up with Rory O’Connor after my session with Ward. Rory’s a filmmaker who came to last year’s Wikimania to make a documentary on Wikipedia. What I didn’t know was that he was so inspired by the proceedings, he decided to release all 13 hours of his footage under a Creative Commons license to encourage folks to mix their own documentaries from the event. Check it out, and mix away! There’s some interview footage of me somewhere in there, and I make a cameo in Rory’s 11-minute rough cut, in the background of Jimbo’s interviews yukking it up with John Breslin.    (KWY)
  • Somehow, I got recruited by multiple Wikipedians to help with the lightning talks due to my process expertise. My expert advice: “Move those chairs into a circle, and be firm with the time limit.” Yes folks, this is why I get paid the big bucks.    (KWZ)
  • Briefly got a chance to chat with Tim Starling about the OpenID integration in Mediawiki. Tim explained that they’re going to unify the user databases across all the different Wikimedia properties. This was further validation that Yoke‘s identity proxy approach is useful. Of course, one of these days, I’m going to have to actually write down what that approach is, so that I can convince people of its utility.    (KX0)

Ward Cunningham at WikiMania

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Just got back from a super intense, super productive 1Society retreat last week in Staunton, Virginia. Despite the photographic evidence to the contrary, we got a lot of stuff done. More on this later.    (KUX)

The next stop on my summer road show is Cambridge, Massachusetts for WikiMania 2006. It starts this Friday, August 4. (Hacking Days start tomorrow.) The program kicks serious butt this year, thanks to Samuel Klein and Phoebe Ayers‘ hard work.    (KUY)

This year, I get the pleasure of interviewing the man himself, Ward Cunningham, on stage. We’re scheduled for 10:45am this Friday, August 4, so please drop by and participate. If you have things you’d like me to ask Ward, you can add them to the session page.    (KUZ)

I have my fingers in a lot of pies, and I get to interact with a lot of great people as a result. But there are no gatherings I look forward to more than to Wiki gatherings. There are just so many great folks in this community. I’m especially looking forward to reconnecting with many of the great people from last year’s Wikimania. Can you tell I’m excited?    (KV0)

If you’re going to Wikimania this weekend, or if you’re in the area, drop me a line!    (KV1)

Fighting WikiSpam: Eaton and Shared Blacklists

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

WikiSym 2005 was awesome. Massive props to Dirk Riehle and the program committee for throwing an outstanding event and drawing tons of great, great people. With Wikimania last August and WikiSym this past week, the Wiki community is really starting to gel. And it’s about time. Can you believe Wikis are 10 years old?    (JXD)

Now the bad news: I walked away with some action items. How do I get myself into these messes?!    (JXE)

The first action item can be traced back to an ad hoc meeting that happened at Wikimania regarding WikiSpam. On August 6, a group of Wiki developers — me (PurpleWiki), Alex Schroeder (OddMuse), Brion Vibber (Mediawiki), Thomas Waldmann (MoinMoin), Sven Dowideit (TWiki), Janne Jalkanen (JSPWiki) — along with John Breslin and Jochen Topf, got together to discuss ways we could collaborate on fighting WikiSpam. Our goal was to identify the simplest possible first step and not to get mired in process discussions.    (JXF)

Since all of us were already maintaining URL blacklists, we decided to merge them and host it as a Sourceforge project. We agreed on a standard format (which I’ll document and post soon), and we agreed to send our respective lists to Alex, who already has scripts to slice, dice, and merge.    (JXG)

One of my action items then was to create the Sourceforge project. I did that immediately, but for some reason, the project was rejected. Thus began a month-long go-around with Sourceforge support where I tried to discover why they had rejected the proposal. In the end, the project was approved, and I never got an answer as to why it was rejected in the first place. At that point, I was mired in other work, and so I never followed up.    (JXH)

WikiSym was the kick in the butt I needed to follow-up. On Sunday, Sunir Shah hosted an antispam workshop, which about 40 people attended. First, Sunir reviewed techniques (many of which are listed at MeatBall:WikiSpam). Then we broke out.    (JXI)

In my breakout, I described what we had agreed on at Wikimania. Then Peter Kaminski described a very cute idea he had for making it easy to fight WikiSpam. In a nutshell, Peter suggested we write a simple drop-in replacement CGI wrapper that would filter a POST payload for spam and call the real CGI script — be it a Wiki, a blog, or anything else — if the payload were spam-free. Such a wrapper would enable users to install spam-protection for any CGI script without having to write a single line of code and without having to do any complex configuration. It wouldn’t require any special access to your web server, since it would just be a CGI script. And you could easily add other spam-fighting measures, such as throttling and IP blacklists.    (JXJ)

I thought it was a brilliant idea. So Peter and I sat down afterwards and whipped it up. Took about an hour. It’s called Eaton, it works, and it’s Public Domain. Peter Kaminski has already blogged about it, and there’s some important commentary there from Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist.    (JXK)

It’s a proof of concept, and it won’t scale. It can and should be improved, and I’d encourage folks to do so. Nevertheless, it’s pretty cool. Bravo to Peter for a very clever idea.    (JXL)

By the way, the first person to figure out the origins of the name “Eaton” wins a cookie.    (JXM)

Fleischbutter

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

With WikiSym about to start, I want to close the loop on an obscure Wikimania item I posted last August. I mentioned something about Fleischbutter. Several folks emailed me asking what it was.    (JX8)

It’s exactly what it sounds like, folks. The literal translation is “meat butter.” More information is available here (thanks to Samuel Klein for spotting this). If folks have pictures of this legendary German dish, please post them there.    (JX9)

Speaking of legends, my friend Dave Arnold recently forwarded me a valuable resource regarding the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I encourage you all to spread the word.    (JXA)

BAR Camp 2005 Redux

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Thoughts on BAR Camp. Yeah, yeah, a little late, I know. Less late than the rest of my Wikimania notes, though.    (JQX)

Many Hats    (JQY)

The most bizarre experience for me at BAR Camp was the number of people I knew from different worlds. My brain was constantly context-switching. It made me painfully aware of the number of different hats I wear, all in the name of Blue Oxen Associates.    (JQZ)

  • Purple Numbers guy.    (JR0)
  • Wiki geek.    (JR1)
  • Identity Commons contributor.    (JR2)
  • Doug Engelbart translator.    (JR3)
  • Usability guy!!! Obviously because of the sprints I’ve organized, but awkward for me, since I have no actual background in usability.    (JR4)
  • Pattern Language hat. I’ve been doing the collaboration Pattern Language dog-and-pony show the past few months, and some folks who’ve heard me speak on the subject were there. I’ll be doing a lot more of it too, so stay tuned. Patterns are damn important, useful, and interesting.    (JR5)
  • Facilitation / event organizer hat.    (JR6)
  • Nonprofit hat. The lack of nonprofit contingent was disappointing, but I had a good conversation with Ho John Lee, who’s done some great work in that space. (We were also both wearing our Korean hats, along with Min Jung Kim, a rarity at events like these.) I also met Phil Klein, a nonprofit guy who also participated in our usability sprint the following week.    (JR7)
  • Ex-DDJ hat. Some fogies, young and old, remembered me from my magazine days.    (JR8)

All this was testament both to my ADD and to the job Chris Messina, Andy Smith, and the other organizers did in only one week. Three hundred people walked through the doors over the weekend. Amazing.    (JR9)

Talks    (JRA)

The best part of the event was strengthening familiar ties and building new ones. I met lots of great people, including folks I’d only known on the ‘net. I wasn’t blown away by the talks for the most part, but some stood out.    (JRB)

  • Ka-Ping Yee did two talks, one on voting methods and another on phishing. Sadly, I only caught the tail end of the latter, but the Wiki page is fairly complete. I’ve never seen Ping do anything that I didn’t find interesting or, in many cases, profound, and these talks were no exception. (I’ll have more to say on Ping’s latest work in a later blog post.)    (JRC)
  • Xiong Changnian presented some interesting quantitative analysis of the Wikipedia community. I didn’t have as much of an opportunity to talk with Xiong as I’d like, but for those of you who have interacted with him, try not to be turned off by his bluster. He’s doing some good work, and he seems to mean well.    (JRD)
  • Rashmi Sinha and I did a roundtable on Open Source usability on the first night. Afterwards, we both agreed that we didn’t learn much new, but simply having the conversation and especially listening to a new audience was valuable. One unintended outcome: A participant (who shall remain nameless, but not unlinked!) complained about Socialtext‘s usability, which I dutifully reported on the Wiki. Adina Levin and Ross Mayfield quickly responded, saying they’re looking to hire a usability person. If you’re in the market, let them know.    (JRE)

I was so busy chatting with people, I also ended up missing a bunch of good talks: Rashmi’s tagging session, Rowan Nairn on structured data for the masses, and Tom Conrad‘s Pandora talk, which seemed to generate the most buzz at the camp.    (JRF)

Throwing Great Events    (JRG)

I toyed with the idea of doing a techie session, but in the end, the talk I should have done was one on patterns and throwing great events. BAR Camp was great, and as with all great collaborative events, there were some common patterns:    (JRH)

  • Food. One of the most critical and, amazingly, most overlooked element in an event. Lots of credit goes to Kitt Hodsden, who made sure there were enough snacks to feed a small country, and the sponsors, who kept the beer flowing and underwrote the party on Saturday night.    (JRI)
  • Introduce Yourself. The organizers borrowed the FOO Camp tradition of saying your name and three words to describe yourself, and they did it each day.    (JRJ)
  • Shared Display and Report Out. Folks did a great job of documenting on the Wiki and on their blogs and Flickr. BAR Camp owned the foobar Flickr fight.    (JRK)
  • Backchannel. I’m not a big fan of IRC at face-to-face events, and there were definitely times when I thought it detracted from the face-to-face interactions. But, it was there, and it was useful. It wasn’t logged, though.    (JRL)
  • Permission To Participate. Lots of Open Space techniques were present — again, borrowed from FOO Camp — like the butcher paper for scheduling sessions. Lots of this was also cultural, though. I think this is the hardest thing for folks who do not live in the Silicon Valley to get — the spirit of sharing that comes so naturally to folks here.    (JRM)

I’d do two things differently at the next event:    (JRN)

  • Incorporate a ritual for new attendees to make them feel welcome and to avoid clique-formation.    (JRO)
  • Add slightly more structure. Now that the organizers have done it once, they can use it as a template for the next event — for example, publishing the time slots ahead of time, and actually enforcing them, at least as far as room usage is concerned. Also, I like scheduled Report Out sessions.    (JRP)

In the postmortem, we talked a bit about what BAR Camp is supposed to be, and I really liked how Chris positioned it: As a model for organizing grassroots, free (or very cheap) alternatives to more expensive gatherings. I’m toying with the idea of incorporating BAR Camp-style alternatives to complement some non-free events I’m organizing.    (JRQ)