I am glad I finally had the opportunity to participate in Wikimania, the international conference where wikipidians and other wiki practitioners get together to discuss, code, and reflect about the future, present, and past of Wikipedia and its sister projects. This year, the conference was host in DC, at the George Washington University campus, and had around 1000 attendees. Meeting members of this networked community in real life was quite exciting. Although I have been an editor of the free encyclopedia and a contributor to the Commons with photographs, I had never had the opportunity to interact in person with so many wikipedians.
In DC, the Wikipedia community looked pretty diverse, international, and inter-generational. Despite the male gender majority, the presence of several women in the conference revealed that more and more females are starting to get involved with the different projects as researchers, editors, programmers, educators, and activists. Attending the conference allowed me to meet wikipedians from different cultures and ages, and to share our experiences as peers contributors. I met several high school students from the UK who were active editors of the free encyclopedia and photographers for the Wikimedia Commons. At first I thought they were just accompanying their parents or grand parents, but after talking with them and seeing them taking lots of pictures with their SLR cameras I understood they were young passionate wikipedians. The inter-generational and inter-cultural quality of wiki-related projects is definitely one of the strengths of the community.
One of the things that struck me about the conference, was the strong presence of governmental and cultural institutions from the USA. One the one hand, the US State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy hosted the Tech@State conference in parallel to Wikimania and in the same venue. I assisted to several panels from Tech@State and learned about the different policies, projects, and collaborations, between the USA government and open data activists and developers. As Beth Simone Noveck pointed out in her keynote, the government is embracing a “wiki way” of doing things and trying to create an open mode of collaboration between citizens, experts, and policy makers. She called this new mode a “hybrid wiki” approach where citizens provide feedback and brainstorm ideas to improve their communities, and experts and policy makers translate those ideas into institutional language. The challenge of such open kind of government is to effectively write policies together and create a legislative framework that support such kind of participation and collaboration. I think that the idea of “hybrid wikis” is very powerful and it would be interesting to see how the different USA e-governement initiatives develop, especially the one on open government.
On the other hand, several professionals from the cultural sector participated in panels and shared their projects and experiences from the GLAM WikiProject (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums). Furthermore, several events where hosted at historical venues such as the Library of Congress opening reception and the GLAM night and party at the Newseum. Among the several awesome projects, the Monmouthpedia project fascinated me. A whole town in Welsh has been mapped and tagged physically with QR codes, and has been documented with articles about places, persons, plants, and other things from Monmouth in Wikipedia. I also liked very much the Wiki Loves Monuments contest, that invites photographers to capture images of national monuments and donating them to the Wikimedia Commons. The contest was first organized in The Netherlands in 2010, and in its second iteration involved 18 countries in Europe. In 2012, the contest is going worldwide and Wikipedia national chapters are helping to coordinate the organization in different countries.
