Humanize the Earth!

I’m in Montreal, near the end of day 1 of WikiSym, waiting for the Wiki Film Festival

including a trailer for a documentary on Wikipedia, “Truth in Numbers“. Other screenings include initial footage from “The Wiki Way,” “OpenFrame” (a documentary on RecentChanges camp in 2006 that everyone should watch), and a relevant selection from my absolute favorite group of videographers … CommonCraft’s “Wikis in Plain English.”

During my wait (everyone else is off napping or quick early dinnering or something or other), I checked out Twitter, which I’d signed up for long ago, but never used because I didn’t understand it and it seemed annoying. I updated my status, saying that I was waiting for the film festival, and then was shortly “followed” by Kevin Makice who’s not here, but wants to know what’s happening. So I posted a new status about writing a blog post, this blog post. Feels strangely and confusingly recursive to write about this process.

Anyway, today. Actually, let’s start with yesterday. It was a really early morning in Portland, OR for an 8:10am flight to Chicago. The flight was delayed and we missed our connection. Which meant a 5 hour layover in Chicago, where I live. But the CTA is eliminating slow zones this weekend so isn’t running trains all the way downtown, and it seemed like more hassle than it was worth to leave, so Ward and I took a nap on the lawn outside the hotel and had a pretty good dinner to kill the time. We got to Montreal pretty late, especially given my role today as open space facilitator, which required setting up and such.

So I got up really early to find room 510d and get set up. And the hotel conference rooms all had names, not numbers. That’s strange, I thought. The hotel calendar doesn’t list us either. Why am I paying over $200/night to stay here again? Anyway, the person at the front desk suggested another place it might be, and I looked it up online, and sure enough, she was right. So off I went down the street, found the place, and it’s huge, seemingly stadium size. After a really long walk inside the place, I found our breakfast setup (I wanted to have the open space set up before having breakfast), but no one around and our room locked. Bummer. Within a minute or so the room was opened and I went to work arranging chairs and making posters and such. All of my internal work and deep breathing seemed to go out the window as I started succumbing to the stress of the whole thing. It wasn’t too bad internally, but I did wonder if this was worth doing (open space inside a traditional conference, where things just aren’t set up well for doing open space).

In any event, “Whenever it starts is the right time” and “Whoever comes is the right people”, but the 8am start time coming and going wasn’t a problem for me. Once we seemed to have a good number, we began, and people filtered in throughout the opening itself, and then the morning. As usual, all I had to do was sit down and shut up for people to quickly move to the center to post topics. The whole thing then self-organized, as it always does, as I went to get myself checked in for the conference itself. When I got back, conversations were well underway. Some of them even go documented throughout the day. Very cool!

One of the most interested conversations of the day that I was involved in was over lunch, with Alain Desilets and Mark Bernstein about locations for next year’s WikiSym, co-location, and some issues and opportunities around a possible co-location with WikiMania. This is purely hypothetical, so please no jumping to conclusions.  Lots of interesting ideas about the nature of academia and publishing, and expense of certain conferences versus what it can do for one’s career to publish there.

Not sure what else there is to say at this point, as it’s much too long already, and I’m tired, and the film festival is supposed to start in 10 minutes, so I’ll leave it there, and if you have questions, feel free to leave a comment or a trackback and I’ll see what I can do.