WIKISYM

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2011, WikiSym celebrates its 7th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Mountain View, California at the Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley.

WikiSym is where researchers, activists, technologists, educators, entrepreneurs and other wiki and open collaboration experts from around the world gather annually to innovate and create. Every year we feature a competitive, peer-reviewed research track as well as a conference-long Open Space track where conference participants can organize their own sessions and discussions. In addition, panels, workshops, posters, demos and a doctoral consortium offer diverse opportunities for sharing and learning.

This year, we are opening the symposium with a keynote by Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons, who has dedicated her career to understanding and supporting open collaboration, particularly to leveraging possibilities at the boundary of formal and informal learning in order to equalize educational opportunity. The symposium will close with a keynote by Bernardo Huberman, Director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Huberman's work is at the frontier of understanding the dynamics of information in large-scale distributed networks.

Together with Wikimedia Foundation, we are also celebrating 10 years of Wikipedia with the WikiViz competition. Participants in WikiViz compete to create the most effective, compelling and creative data-driven visualizations of how Wikipedia impacted the world with its content, culture and open collaboration model. Awards will be announced at the symposium where visualization expert Jeffrey Heer from Stanford University will present a short keynote in honor of the event.