Last Wiki Wednesday at the Socialtext offices in Palo Alto, during the all-day hackathon, people from out on the street kept coming in to ask, “What ARE you? Are you… working?” Juggling, beer, and scruffy people lounging on beanbags radiated an atmosphere of slack, but all around me people were hacking up a storm. Christine Herron wrote up the presentations and demos of the wikithon projects like Word Cloud, Magic Tags, Wiki Analytics, and the weirdest, “SocialZork”.
This was my introduction to working at Socialtext. I saw the developers pair up and get stuff done in a chaotic environment. They argued, threw around ideas, and passed their laptops back and forth. At the end of the day it turned into a party, and some of the best conversations I had about wikis were with end users and wiki admins like Dvortygirl , who’s going to come and talk at the upcoming Wikichix meetup this Thursday night. That and the Hat Factory co-working day and dinner-making tomorrow will be a nice surge of productive social activity for me in a week of working alone and telecommuting.
Next week, March 7, we’re hosting another Wikithon, distributed across several cities in the U.S. and Europe. Bryan Pendleton from geekdom.net and Xerox PARC will be speaking in Palo Alto at the start of our Wiki Wednesday party. I’m curious to hear his talk on building tools to help identify conflict on Wikipedia. Though I’m not sure what that would look like, I have a funny picture now of flame war red alert controversy monitors, with consensus-building firefighters dispatched to dispense peace, love, and anarchy.
In Palo Alto, our new co-working space is still under construction, without a lot of furniture, and the walls are bare. February’s hackathon gave me the feeling that the bare office was a new, empty wiki, sparse and unbeautiful, but with the potential of the blank page for collaboration. I’m eager to see the new ideas and new projects coalesce at the March wikithon next week. Sign up if you’ll be there!
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