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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by EricaG~enwiki (talk | contribs) at 21:41, 21 October 2005 (→International Conferences in US, but not Boston). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

From the Colbert Report: "Ever walk into a room and everyone stops talking? That's how it feels to be America."

International Conferences in Boston

International Conferences in US, but not Boston

Flights and countries

6/17-6/22 | 8/3-8/7

  • STA travel rates?
  • Iceland air
  • Individual countries:
    Germany
    France
    Italy
    UK/London



Notes on budgets

We need more precise room allocations for better pricing. +sj + 17:19, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

$30-60 for Harvard; $20-$60 for MIT; a large diff b/t a week of a double and a night of a single :) probably the same for TOR.
Hostel in Boston: "$32-$35 per night per person"

Also: Canadians don't get 'printed and photographed coming into the US... (via Seb, local Canuck)

Scheduling thoughts

  • Have a day for the community only, before the main conference (whenever hacking days are). For Wikimedia contributors and invited friends; with clustered introductions in the morning, group lunch, sessions and a party/event at night.
  • As with WM '05, have sponsored int'l guests arrive at least a day before the community gatherings, for orientation (incl. language orientation/pairing up[1] if needed), meeting one another, and some discussions about international outreach.
[1] A good suggestion from the local interpreter community : avoid simulint for main sessions (clumsy, costly equipment, can ruin a session); save it for the press room and pair up [whisper] interpreters with those few guests who need them. This is also far more friendly for the guests.

Visa thoughts

What's up with biometrics and visa/passport requirements?

  • US demands for biometrics pushed back to Oct 2006, maybe cancelled. Digital photos required instead (as on the new UK overseas passports).
  • 27 countries' citizens eligible for visa waivers; must qualify.
  • People without 'digital photos' (digitally signed?) on their passports have to upgrade. (at the cost of a new 'port? ask about prices.)
    ditto for visa prices, and times (the State Dept has lists; 8-30 days?)

Explicit support

The following groups are actively interested in helping out.

  • The Berkman Center has been generous with offers of space and time. We have the use of any rooms we need, and in the past two weeks have already had significant support from the Center's managing director (Colin Maclay) and staff. Contact: Colin Maclay, Erica George
  • MIT Media Lab - many fans there.
    electronic publishing in particular is keen on supporting a conference 'in any way they can'; WP, a unified translation dictionary, and other projects are diretly tied into their work this year and in the foreseeable future. Contact: Mako Hill
    $100 laptop project hopes to work more closely with WP, for integration of content and possible development of richer interface layers. Contact: Alan Kay
    General Media Lab support could help out with hacking days, for instance; a much larger body of wiki hackers can be found around campus there.
  • Free Biology @ HMS and around Boston - interested in directly supporting MediaWiki development. Some grad-student support through a professor at HMS, if needed. Contact: Sasha Wait

Education

  • Project NTC - MIT and related work on educational collaborative software. They are developing a 4-yr Rockefeller grant with a network of universities and middle schools geared up to run pilots. The project is looking for ideas and publicity; its principals consider WP to iconify two of the four core student interactions they're trying to implement. Contact : Ravi
  • Middle school science fair - a project helping two classes of students, in Boston and Tel Aviv?, working in English and Hebrew, to design a planet. With support from Tufts' Wright Center, a collection of interested science-knowledgable parents, and scientists from the Technion. Interested in ideas of better ways to help the classes interact and share their research online. Contact: Nitzan Resnick

Librarianship

  • Librarian networks - the local SLA chapter would like to be involved; they don't have much cash but can help volunteer; have long experience with dealing with local hotels and visiting guests, otherwise looking after speakers; producing signs and handouts to orient people; &c. Contact: jkb'
    Ref librarians (including one of the country's finest digital librarians) offered to handle information desk(s) on site, wiki updating, etc. Contact: Jessamyn
    Would also love to help us develop better connections within the library community, select great speakers, &c.
  • Harvard Libraries - the Law Library director wants to know what they can do to help. We can probably arrange whatever we want with libraries on campus; there are both fantastic resourecs here and broad support from them. We could reserve a few 15-person rooms for a focused day-long wikifest in a library.

Large organizations

  • The W3C. Love the conference idea; seriously considering sponsorship.
  • IBM research labs. Definitely want to help out somehow; planning another big Wikipedia research project over the coming year. Considering sponsorship. Contact: Martin W
  • O'Reilly - book support for a writing contest. (might make good party sponsors; haven't been asked)
  • Museum of Science - collaboration on educational projects; want to talk more about sponsoring an event in the museum.


Active interest

People and organizations which are interested in Wikimania and would like to be involved; or have offered non-specific support and could be asked for something specific.

  • International groups : the Woodbridge Society (around Harvard). Large, close-knit alum community around the world; interested in helping spread the word.
  • The Kennedy School of Government [KSG]. Two grads there are interested in helping attract the right speakers, sponsor guests from Latin America, and draw professors working on e-government and ICTs.
    We could use their excellent ARCO Forum for a suitable satellite talk/event.
    Specific support available from the Belfer Center's Digital Governance initiative, part of the National Center for Digital Government. Contact: Center director Jane Fountain
    Travel support available from the David Rockefeller Institute for Latin American Studies; particularly from Chile, where they have a branch. A proper pitch remains to be made; it was suggested they could bring over "maybe 4 people" from Latin America for Wikimania. contact: Federico Baradello
    One of the best technical institutes in Latin America, Mexico's ITAM, has recently become a sister school of sorts to the KSG. They have extensive funds for student exchange and other collaboration; could likely send a couple of technologists or presenters to Boston for a few weeks overlapping with Wikimania. contact: Federico Baradello


  • Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing (pdf), a long-term project started this spring that expects to scale up to 100 people in its own building in 5 years. Has funds to support relevant research & collaboration; could cover bringing relevant speakers/devs to a conf/hackfest. A good way to involve the entire university, if some kind of coordination with subject experts is useful for a test project.
"IIC is looking to fund projects that:
- involve groups of researchers at Harvard
- require extraordinary computing-related capabilities
- require close collaborations between traditional scientists and computer scientists
- address an unsolved need that applies to more than one discipline
- is of interest to computer science"

They move slowly, however, and haven't gotten to discuss Wikimania & related projects yet.


  • CMS @ MIT - "comparative media studies" and the Education Arcade. Discussions of games and massively multiplayer environments (1000-person collaborative games), applied to knowledge creation; want to develop better environments/interfaces for collaboration.
  • Cambridge city government. Support from three councilmen; but they are currently worried about the pending election. After that, once it is known who the Mayor is, it will be easy to get support, notice via official city channels, etc. Ditto from our state rep, Marty Walz. This kind of support is very helpful for getting in touch with first-generation communities that still have broad connections with their native countries.
  • Boston Public Libraries. We could arrange tours or satellite events with them; they often have speaking events in their central building, which are naturally publicized through the city calendars and community-education channels.
  • Wolfram Research. Good ongoing correspondence with both Eric Weisstein and Stephen Wolfram re: how to make both MathWorld/PhysicsWorld and WP better. Very interested in Wikipedia and its development.


Media

  • The Globe. They've run a number of pieces on Wikipedia and Wikinews, and are planning another series on Wikipedia from a contributor's perspective. Were definitely interested in covering Wikimania; asked for details last year but didn't run a piece. Local interest would make it a much bigger deal.
  • The New York Times. Have reporters who would expressly be interested in covering the conference; even outside of tech-writers (jenny 8, et al).
  • CCTV -- a well-supported community TV studio. They would be glad to film satellite events not covered by on-campus media; hard to be definite without a better sense of what such events would be like. There are local TV stations where we could get airtime for such video, and a community studio for people to collaborate directly on editing footage for the same purpose.
    There is also the educational-cable system in Boston; I don't know how their audience size compares. The City of Cambridge can provide access to those stations for TV broadcasts (the question would be, how long to broadcast what)
  • MIT's Technology Review (circulation: 300k+). They love WP, invited Jimbo to speak at their last conference, and have a receptive audience for Wikimedia's goals (all MIT alums + 100k others). Three of the conference organizers (who were also the managing editors & publishers of the magazine) took time to praise Wikipedia.
  • Christopher Lydon's Open Source program. Lydon and Ben Walker, who maintains the blog and records much of the shows, are huge fans, ran two of their early shows about WP, and normally run around Boston gathering audio. Would be interested in doing something fun with 3 days of Wikimania. (They also have many other local radio contacts; Chris Lydon was one of the biggest radio personalities on public radio before spinning off his own show.)

Venue

Rooms

  • For parallel sessions: Austin hall (A/V/Videoconf; room for 800 in 4 rooms)
  • For large plenaries: Sanders Theater (room for 700/1000 with orch/balcony), $965/day

Housing

  • HLS dorms for 690 people. Good availability in the summer; they "would really like to have us there" (as opposed to in other dorms nearby). Only question: which building to put us in? Dorm oversight is changing hands this fall... contact: Anne Marie Cal'reso.
  • Many locals will be here; there will also be couch space available (count: 3 couches and 6+ couchsurfers)

Schedule

Tech events

Hacking Days events

  • Local-org interest : Brett S.
  • Sponsorship : Media lab?
  • Room interest : CS lounge + conf room.

Community & social events

Conference events

Speaker invitations

Panel planning

Satellite events

  • Party for 800 people : where?
  • Smaller party for speakers
    Where - M. of Science (100-person room), third-party sponsor? Fogg museum or Busch Hall?
  • Outings into the city
    Historic tours - by foot; on bike
    Library and museum tours -
    Emerald necklace tour
    Walden pond/beach trips

Setup

Technical setup

  • Ambient network
    provided @ HLS, media-lab; check Mus of Sci, &c
  • Supplementary LAN
    Extra access points & routers

Tables, booths, chairs

Finances

Sponsorships

  • IBM Watson (ping)
  • MIT Media Lab (ping, interest)

Other

  • Purchases and Receipts: help from Berkman for uni expenses.
  • Insurance: Largely provided via Harvard and other venues.



Media

  • Amanda
  • Brandon S

Mainstream Media

Local

PRX, Open Source...
Globe, Herald

Global

NYT; Fr/De/Ja press;
Metro(!)

New Media (Bloggers, et al)

Local

Boston blog & tech groups

Global

Global voices (multiling)

Official sources

Internal Wikimania blog

setup, hosting; editorial team

Dedicated Wikinews newsroom

prep by Boston Wikinewsies. long/short story planning

Transcripts / sudiocasts / videocasts

English transcripts
Other-lang real-time summaries, enhanced by translation (es/fr/de/ja)

Collaborations

  • FSF (ping)
  • Media Lab (yes)
  • Harvard Libraries (yes); Boston Library (ping)
  • PBHA

Multilingualism & Translation

  • Harvard: Woodbridge Society | Int'l offices @ Harvard. Boston Language Institute?
  • MIT : talk to Ilya... User:Ilya
  • Boston groups : Hippo Family
  • Michael Feldman.
  • William Shatner panel.


Banners & flags

Signs & posters

  • HLS printing shop

Pamphlets, books

Stickers, schwag

  • Brett S - laptop stickers et al. Flash demo of campus.

Team management

News, archives & ref desk

Jessamyn (& posse)

University coordination

+sj +

Student group coord.

+sj +

Other volunteer coord.

Release forms

For republishing/broadcasting. checks for photo-shyness

Contracts

Many handled by Berkman; contracts with other venues.
pro-bono legal help...

University and school networks

Harvard

College

  • Computer Society
  • JP's ug law class
  • Woodbridge
  • (various)

Law School

  • Mary Br. (mbridges)
  • JOLT group
  • (various)

Med School

  • Carl Blesius (not yet)

Ed. School

Business School

Kennedy School of Government

  • Federico B - fbaradello@gmail (not yet)
  • Hsing_Wei@ksg06 (not yet)

Extension School

Graduate School of Design

GSAS

MIT

  • iCampus...

Media Lab

Sloan Business School

Other

  • The education arcade
  • CSAIL

Other universities

BC

BU

  • ...

Brandeis

  • Dave
  • Eve (x2)
  • (BS)

Wellesley

  • Matt G

Northeastern

Simmons

  • Brandon

Suffolk

Tufts

  • Brandon
  • Erik T

Wentworth

Emmanuel

Wheelock

Emerson

Lesley

  • 6am with BS

Other networks

Education

  • Boston high school consortia
    User:Mysekurity
  • The Boston Foundation (helpful)
    Cambridge school volunteers
    Boston Partners for Education
  • $100 laptop initiative
  • Phillips Brooks' House (interest)
  • RI Primary
    Paul Cuffee
    Dede @ Ed School

Law

  • Sister groups at Stanford & Oxford

Technology

  • Ximian/Novell
  • SIGS : Techdinner / Gen dinners / Techbabes / Nonprofit Tech
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