Tag Archives: wiki

Call for bid proposals for hosting BlogTalk 2010 / 2011: The International Conference on Social Software

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BlogTalk, the International Conference on Social Software, is designed to allow dialogue between practitioners, developers and academics who are involved in the area of social software (blogs, wikis, forums, IM, social networks, microblogging, etc.). As well as a programme of peer-reviewed presentations, BlogTalk features prominent speakers from successful social media companies, research organisations, etc. Typical attendance figures are over 100 people.

The BlogTalk steering committee encourages you to submit a preliminary bid to host the International Conference on Social Software in 2010 or 2011. The annual conference includes a combination of formal talks, workshops, breakout sessions, networking opportunities, and social events. We seek to hold our annual conference in a diverse range of localities (previous countries were Austria, Australia, Ireland and Korea). Each conference involves a working partnership between the BlogTalk steering committee, the host organisers, and a programme committee of expert reviewers.

Conference schedules have typically followed the pattern of having two full days of talks, with interleaved discussion panels, birds of a feather sessions, etc. although each host has flexibility about when to hold certain extra events, or sometimes, whether to hold them at all. We recommend that the dinner event be held on the first night, in the middle of the conference. There is also an option to have a day of workshops prior to the main conference talks, and a welcome reception the night before the main conference.

Each host takes a lead role in gathering sponsorship for its conference. Usually, tickets account for about $15,000 – 20,000 and the host is responsible for raising at least $20,000 – 35,000 in sponsorship. The combined funds go a long way toward making the conference budget manageable. A small portion of the conference budget will also go into a central BlogTalk fund for aiding with publications and future events.

Sponsorship includes the placement of a logo on materials such as the attendee’s pack, t-shirts, and the conference website. It may include free registration for two attendees, and a guaranteed slot for a product demo during the conference’s demonstrations session. The conference’s main event, the dinner, can also be sponsored. As well as a placard at the entrance to the event, the sponsor will be acknowledged on the website, during the programme chair’s speeches, and in conference materials.

With your help, the steering committee will also help market the event in a variety of ways, through targeted emails and social media distribution channels.

To be considered as a host for BlogTalk 2010 or BlogTalk 2011, please fill out the attached preliminary bid proposal and return to us (blogtalk2010@gmail.com) by January 18, 2010. The steering committee will consider all proposals and notify within two weeks of the closing date.

Bid Proposal for BlogTalk 2010 or 2011

Contact Person:
Organisation:
Address:
Telephone:
Email:

Which year are you bidding for (2010 or 2011)?

Proposed Hotel / Venue Name:
Location/Address:
Distance from Major Airport (Miles):
Distance from Major Airport (Minutes):

Describe potential keynote speakers you would intend to have speak at the event:

Give details of previous conferences and workshops that you and your team have organised:

Describe available transportation modes and costs between major airport and preferred conference venue hotel (shuttle, taxi, etc.):

Describe the preferred conference venue / hotel’s accommodations (lodging and meeting rooms, public areas):

Give details of any possible social events that could be held:

Describe the restaurants, shopping, and night life close to the preferred conference hotel:

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Welcome to the Wiki World of Irish Culture

(This was written for a press release, not sure if we are issuing it now as there’s lots going on / out of here at the moment, but anyway it should be of interest to the Irish blog-reading community… If anyone wants to help out, post a comment below!)

Wiki IrelandWiki Ireland

Wikis are the latest technology lighting up the World Wide Web.

A wiki (from the Haiwaiian word for “quick”) is a collaborative website whose content can be edited by anyone who has access to it.

“Wiki Ireland” (www.wiki.ie) was set up as a non-profit project to create a valuable local knowledge store for Ireland’s culture and heritage. The founder of the project is Dr. John Breslin, a researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). With the slogan “our past is our present to the future”, Wiki Ireland will act as a focus for collecting local knowledge and articles that may or may not be deemed noteworthy for a general encyclopedia.

The projects aims to use Wiki Ireland as a central site for collecting Irish knowledge such as folklore, history or geographical information from participants. The site welcomes contributors willing to devote any time to creating or maintaining articles on the knowledge store, be they teachers, students, librarians or knowledge enthusiasts! Articles can include local songs, poems or recitations; historical descriptions of towns, buildings or people; recommended walks for visitors to a particular region; fairy or folk tales; etc.

Wiki IrelandWiki Ireland has goals in common with a number of Irish regional heritage plans. For example, the Galway Heritage Plan 2004-2008 lists as actions to “develop an oral heritage and folklore archive” and “implement an archive outreach programme” amongst others. The image of the Red Squirrel, a disappearing character from the Irish landscape, has been chosen as the logo for the site.

“I have a personal interest in putting an archive of recitations online”, said Breslin. “My grandfather, Jack Casey, has been transcribing recitations from memory and elsewhere that he has been interested in since he was in school. My aunt typed up his _first_ volume of handwritten pages, amounting to over 500 songs and poems, and I have just started to input these into the Wiki Ireland site.”

For more information, visit www.wiki.ie.

Notes for Editors:

Wiki:

Wikis enable documents to be written collectively (co-authoring) using a web browser. Wikis are often open to the general public without the need to register any user account. Many wikis operate with a “free documentation license”, so that their content can be freely used and distributed by others.

The most famous online wiki is the Wikipedia, the world’s largest general knowledge encyclopedia with over 675,000 articles.

As well as the English Wikipedia, there are smaller sized encyclopedias available in over 170 other languages including Irish.

The first wiki-focussed conference was held in Frankfurt in August, at which Dr. Breslin talked with the creator of the first wiki, Ward Cunningham. He also met Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, where they discussed the open inclusion process of Wikipedia as opposed to the more traditional printed encyclopedias.

“I’d just created my first Wikipedia article, about a 1970s music group with the wonderful name ‘Tonto’s Expanding Head Band’. Jimmy Wales said you’d _never_ get that in one of the other encyclopedias.”

DERI:

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) was established in 2003 at the National University of Ireland, Galway through funding from Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Government’s National Development Plan. DERI carries out research in the area of the “Semantic Web”: the next generation of web technologies that will allow people and machines to make better use of the resources available via the Internet.

Mentioned in BBC News Magazine

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Rewriting the rule books

David posted a link to this article on the Y! irishblogs mailing list, and before I’d finished reading it I was about to say “hey, I was there!”: then I saw that I’d gotten a mention for my blog post about my first Wikipedia article on “Tonto’s Expanding Head Band”…

Blogs also give a sense of why people commit time to the encyclopaedia, recent examples including Pete Ashton’s Goodbye Myspace, Hello Wikipedia! and John Breslin’s My First Wikipedia Article: the latter’s an entry on some prog rock synth maestros who helped Stevie Wonder with his funkiness: a sample entry from an encyclopaedia that doesn’t have to worry about how many pages it has.