WikiSym 2007 - The Summary
As promised, here is a short summary on what I think about the WikiSym 2007. All together it was another great conference. I talked with a lot of interesting people. I especially enjoyed the continued work on projects started on previous conferences like on Creole or the Universal Wiki Edit Button. It is a great experience to see how ideas are carried out by people who just rarely meet and live thousands of kilometers apart. It's the true wiki way 
.
But of course there is some room for improvement. It showed again that running talks and panels at the same time with OpenSpace is a bit unfortunate. Many suggested to separate them and shorten the presentation times to 10 minutes. I like the general mix of formal academic talks and the less formal OpenSpace sessions. But I agree that not running them at the same time would be a good idea.
Personally I'm more interested in the technical stuff than the cultural and social influences of the wiki spirit. The latter seems to have the slightly stronger coverage at WikiSym. So Recent Changes / RoCoCo Camps tops WikiSym if I had to decide between the two 
. But Dirk Riele already suggested to do a wiki developers meet up with short presentations on different engines next year. A real life WikiMatrix . I really like the idea as it could return some focus to technology and at the same time give non-technical folks a chance to see different wikis and talk to their developers.
I also missed a few people from the Wiki community at the WikiSym. Eg. Angela Beesley, Sunir Shah, Raymond King and Eugene Eric Kim. Some of them even where mentioned in the program but never showed up. I have no idea what happened, but maybe they were all at Sunir's engagement party . Congratulations, Sunir!
So I'm looking forward to the next Wiki conference and hope to meet all of you again
This post was originally published at cosmocode.de