Random thoughts from Wikimania, 2015 edition (2013, 2014): Dancing: After five Wikimedia events (not counting WMF all-hands) I was finally dragged onto the dance floor on the last night. I’ll never be Garfield, but I had fun anyway. The amazing setting did not hurt. Our hosts: The conference was excellently organized and run. I’ve never…
Quick brain dump after a bike ride home: free software took a huge leap in the late 90s and early 00s in large part because of non-ideological advantages that the rest of the world is now competing with or surpassing: Collaboration tools: Because we got to the ‘net first, our tools for collaborating with each…
It has been a long time since I was able to say to developer friends “come work with me” in anything but the most abstract “come work under the same roof” kind of sense. But today I can say to developers “come work with me” and really mean it. Which is fun :) Details: Wikimedia’s new…
It has been nearly a full decade since Jon Udell’s classic screencast about Wikipedia’s article on the Heavy Metal Umlaut (current text; Jan. 2005). In this post, written for Paul Jones’ “living and working online” class, I’d like to use the last decade’s changes to the article to illustrate some points about the modern Wikipedia.1 Measuring…
Primarily what I did during Wikimania was chew on pens. However, I also gave some talks. The first one was on Creative Commons 4.0, with Kat Walsh. While targeted at Wikimedians, this may be of interest to others who want to learn about CC 4.0 as well. Second one was on Open Source Hygiene, with…
A collection of semi-random notes from Wikimania London, published very late: The conference generally Tone: Overall tone of the conference was very positive. It is possibly just small sample size—any one person can only talk to a small number of the few thousand at the conference—but seemed more upbeat/positive than last year. Tone, 2: The one…
A friend of a friend asked this morning: Hmmm trying to upload a CC0 public domain presentation from #OKFest14 by @punkish and @SlideShare don’t have public domain license option :( — Jenny Molloy (@jenny_molloy) July 22, 2014 I suggested Wikimedia Commons, but it turns out she wanted something like Slideshare’s embedding. So here’s a test…
[Attention conservation notice: probably not of interest to lawyers; this is about my previous life in software development.] Someone recently mentioned JWZ’s old post on the CADT (Cascade of Attention Deficit Teecnagers) development model, and that finally has pushed me to say: I am the CADT. I did the bug closure that triggered Jamie’s rant,…
More random, more-or-less stream-of-(un)consciousness notes on the last few days of Wikimania: The cab driver who got me to the airport had (at least) five cellphones. Two were mounted on each side of the steering wheel, and then a fifth appeared from somewhere else half-way through our drive to the airport. Two were Android(-ish?) smartphones,…
Soooo much. As with the first two days, these are fragmentary notes as much for my benefit as for anyone else’s, so take with bullet points of salt: The lion dance in the opening ceremony was exactly as advertised – a good way to wake up. It was nice to hear the French issue called…