The Socialtext developers are a distributed team, and in May, most of us got together in Vancouver for a week-long meeting and hackathon. It was great to have face to face time with my co-workers! While some of the hackathon became a meeting-a-thon, that was productive too. Developers worked on more projects than I could keep track of, including pluggability, removing thousands of lines of code, adding a wiki view for Most Wanted Pages, making the open source release easier to install, and building test bots. We worked all week from the Sxip offices; sadly I did not get to meet Dick Hardt, but I did get an awesome tshirt that said “Who’s the dick writing comments on my blog?”

On Wednesday night we gathered at the Sophos offices for a van.pm Perlmongers meeting. I got to meet Chris Simmons and konobi, who I see all the time on irc as I lurk on #socialtext. Everyone went around the room with brief introductions; many people were from Sophos, Active State, and a few from nearby universities and small startups. Luke Closs gave a brief talk on Hacktastic Wiki Tricks, a condensed version of some things he’ll delve into at the upcoming YAPC in Houston. Kirsten Jones talked about Hydra and the Perl Foundation site, which now runs on a Socialtext wiki, with Hydra generating the front end, which looks like a static web page. Ingy schooled us all in the long, gossipy history of YAML and syck, and some forward-looking to Perl 6. Then after a break for pizza, Bill Odom did a sort of town meeting with questions and answers about The Perl Foundation, especially encouraging people to apply for grants to do Perl projects — you don’t have to be an expert or well known in the field to get funding from TPF.

On Friday, we met in the Bryght offices for a community hackathon, which we tried to model after the fabulous SuperHappyDevHouse. Though, as I pointed out, it was not in a house, otherwise it was true to the spirit of SHDH. I hung out with Roland Tanglao, Drupal hackers Steven Wittens and Ariane, Boris Mann, Miss604 who I realized afterwards was a fellow Metroblogger, and several people from Uberbabe and Free Geek, who gave (sold) me some great stickers.

In between all this gossip and talking I managed to poke around in Luke’s “Most Wanted Pages” code a little bit, earning the embarrassing nickname of “Sir Commits-a-Lot” as I floundered around with svk for the first time; and I watched Chris McMahon do some programming in Ruby, which I haven’t tried yet. My friend Heidi, who does the security bulletins for Microsoft, came up in the evening with an enormous tupperware container full of cookies and gingerbread to top off everyone’s beer and pizza and bbq experience. A further note. The geek and web 2.0 population of Vancouver intersects with startling density with the international Naked Bike Ride movement. What is it with naked bike riding and open source geeks?

In my whirlwind tour of the Web 2.0 company offices of Vancouver, I noticed they shared a particular groovy aesthetic that was beautiful, but cold and maybe too slick and lacking in couches for my taste. A little more scruffiness is really okay. The lack of cubicles rocked, as did the wacky color schemes – look at the bright green walls here:

For more photos, see Zac Bir’s Vancouver photoset or Chris Dent’s set — both of them are great photographers; I wish I had their eye for composition.

Today, Luke Closs, Matthew O’Connor, Kirsten Jones, and I will be at Web2Open, a small conference-within-a-conference, Barcamp-style, at Web 2.0 Expo, in Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. We’ll be hanging out in the Mashroom and then, at 5pm, leading a discussion about blikis, wikis, workflow, and basically “stuff to build on top of wikis” like Blikistan and Hydra. Probably Luke will give a sneak preview of his upcoming talk for YAPC, “Hacktastic Wiki Tricks“.

In the tradeshow or expo hall, I think Jeff Brainard is going to be at a booth doing demos and talking with people, so go say hi to him!

Ross Mayfield will be talking Wednesday morning at 9:40 as one of the keynote speakers, along with Dan Farber (ZDNet), Satish Dharmaraj (Zimbra) and Matthew Glotzbach (Google Enterprise), in a panel called “Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Is it Soup Yet?”. His other panel is on Wednesday afternoon, Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: What Corporations Really Want and Use, with Rob Rueckert (Intel), Michael Lenz (Cisco), David Meyer (BEA), and Joe Schueller (P&G).

Meanwhile, Socialtext developer Ingy dot Net, from YAPC::Asia or an undetermined hackathon in Tokyo (I can’t quite pin down his location but it involves cosplay and fast motorcycles) has created Document::Parser which he explains in completely plain (to him) English what his new code does. I like the bit where he boasts that “The wikitext parser is now so simple that it is conceivable that my boss could hack on it.” That gave me a good laugh. Ross, are you ready to get your hack on?

Our April Wiki Wednesday was informal and fun. Over pizza and beer, Peter Kaminski and I showed off the hacks from the Wikithon. Leslie Wu from Stanford’s HCI group demonstrated “Programming by a Sample: Rapidly Prototyping Web Applications with d.mix”, a video demo of a web app that allows users to drag content by tag from places like Flickr into a wiki, annotating it with a simple interface. The ubicomp mashup wiki has some good information about the philosophy and tools used by Leslie’s Stanford HCI crowd, starting with this MashupDefinition.

When Gordon explained pageoftext.com, we all got excited at its simplicity, and talked about applications for it like “organizing the potluck dinner”. An extended family or a not-very-techy-group of people might use a simple app like pageoftext to list who’s bringing what foods as well as dietary restrictions. I like this example a lot, as I can imagine the 100 potluck dinner emails from 20 people, like a rampaging stampede of Too Much Information, cut off at the pass by a lone cowboy of a wiki page.

Stewart Mader walked us through some of the Wiki Patterns site, and I appreciated hearing about its history and development, as well as some of the wiki community sources it builds on, like MeatballWiki , sources from Socialtext, and other ongoing conversations. Since I’m a newcomer to the world of wiki theory (though not to wiki use), the history and sources for these discussions are particularly important to me so I can understand context. I appreciate Stewart’s community work and was happy to have representatives from Atlassian come and participate in Wiki Wednesday. In fact, I envision that developers and wiki theorists from other wiki companies like WetPaint and PBWiki will have many cool events where we can share ideas. While in some areas we might be competing, I firmly believe there is plenty of room, and that we will all benefit from a philosophy of openness. Eugene Eric Kim encouraged me in this and got me talking to folks from several other wiki companies, and I appreciate his acting as a wiki community leader.

Jack Herrick and Dvortygirl gave us a demo of WikiHow’s organization and administrative procedures. Jack apologized for the impurity and un-wikiness of their Firefox toolbar extension, but hey, if it works, it works. A lot of us got excited about WikiHow’s gardening methods, which connected interestingly back to Bryan Pendleton’s talk from last month’s Wiki Wednesday. (He’ll be giving that talk again very soon, at CHI2007, in case you missed it.) Anyway, here’s how WikiHow’s toolbar works. Featured articles are the most likely to be vandalized. In your WikiHow Firefox toolbar, you see a flashing alert sign when a featured article gets edited. As a signed in user, you can then go and patrol the article, checking it off as okay if it’s okay. If it’s been vandalized and you fix the article, your own edit will then fire off an alert, so another editor will need to sign off on the article. Then, everyone’s alert signs stop flashing! Jack vandalized an article by Dvortygirl, and within a couple of minutes, someone else had fixed the page and another editor cleared it.

The WikiHow toolbar also shows the number of unpatrolled edits to the entire community. Before this number was exposed in such a clear and consistent way in the toolbar, it hovered in the high hundreds or even thousands. Now, it mostly stays below 100. During Wiki Wednesday, it was at 20-30. Note that because it’s in a Firefox toolbar, WikiHow devotees see that information all the time, while they’re working on other things. I liked what Jack said about this feature: “People want to do good things; just give them information about what’s wrong.” That’s definitely wiki-ish philosophy! And that was the nicest thing for me about Wiki Wednesday. I had the feeling of being in the same room with people who were all on the same page in key ways, who all believe in the power of wikis and of collaboration.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the London Wiki Wednesday has been heating up. You can read a detailed report of it, with links to liveblogging and notes including a cool mindmap, over here in a great post by David Terrar. David also blogged the evening at Business Two Zero. Rather than repeat everything David said, I’m going to go right now and edit his page to add links to the people and companies that participated. That’s the Wiki Way, right? However, it’s the bloggity way to give people link love, so I’ll just add here that participants (named in pleasantly medieval style with blog or company appended) included people from Wetpaint, Scott Gavin and Simon Revell from Pfizer, Guillame Lerouge (using Xwiki), Dennis Howlett, Philip Woodgate, Andrew Black, Angela Beesley from Wikimedia, Stefan Szczkelkun, Paul Youlten of Socialtext and Yellowikis, Lars Ploughman, Mark Baker of Spikesource, Stephan Tual of Terapad, and Toby Moores of Sleepydog. Thanks for the great writeup, David! I think we both need a videoblogger so we can watch each others’ Wiki Wednesdays.

In Palo Alto, at our next Wiki Wednesday on May 2, 6:30pm, Rashmi Sinha will speak on “Building and Designing for Large Participatory Social Systems”. Please sign up on our wiki or on the invite at upcoming.org if you’d like to come!

At the April Wikithon, Socialtext developers got together – in person and online – to play around and do some hacking. Chris Dent, Matthew O’Connor, and Jon Prettyman met up in Centralia, WA to work (along with Zac Bir) on a Python REST API client using Turbogears. Their Turbogears app is like a face on top of a Socialtext wiki; it lets you edit and view the wiki from its own interface, and develop features using their tools. I haven’t seen it in action yet, but the code is in our open source repository.

In Chris’s description of the project he and Jon hope to make the code easier for others to work with:

Good hygiene in the codebase, including things like template files and configurability, is one of the keys to including other folk in the development of the code. If we’re going to do inclusive things like democratise development it has to be easier for people to get in there, mess around, turn the knobs, and build new bits.

That’s what we all plan to do at our next big face to face meeting in May, outlined by Chris and others in Plug in the Pluggability. We took our code open source; now we have to live up to that by making the code easier to work with.

Out at YAPC::Asia, Ingy dot Net worked on Spork::Parser and Module::Make, a new way to make Perl modules. Chris Simmons and Luke Closs walked through setting up a development environment on Socialtext Virtual, which runs on VMware. Luke did further work on Blikistan, resulting in a nifty new way to read our developer blogs. Luke and Kevin Jones prototyped a wiki calendar. Kirsten Jones wrote a css uploader for Socialtext Open, which should make Chris Messina happy; she also demoed a previous hack, Hydra, which puts a Web 1.0 face on top of a wiki, allowing the contents to be viewed but not edited, and styled to fit a particular web site’s look. Casey West wrote a table editor, Andy Lester spiked an effort to get mysql working with Socialtext, and Gordon McCreight created http://pageoftext.com, a plain text wiki where the page url serves as the password. In the Palo Alto co-working office, James Littlejohn and Jack Herrick joined us to work on their own wikis.

At the tail end of the Wikithon, Leslie Wu from the Stanford HCI department showed up to give us a demo of a wiki mashup using d.mix. We invited Leslie to show the d.mix demo to everyone at Wiki Wednesday. I’ll post about that separately.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Wikithon. I’d love, in future, to bring in more editors and wiki administrators and gardeners, in addition to people working on code. If, for example, a group working on a particular subject or page in Wikipedia wanted to come by and use the Wikithon to do a day-long focused burst of activity and collaboration, it would add a lot to the conversation, and they might get help and input from unexpected sources. I’ll be inviting my own group, the editors of a Feminist Science Fiction Wiki, to join in person or remotely, at next month’s Wikithon!

SXSWi mixed work, talk, and fun in its usual tornado-like style. I met a fair amount of wiki people, but I agree with Evan Prodromou, I’d like to see more of a wiki invasion at SXSWi next year!

Several people liveblogged Evan’s talk, Commercialization of Wikis. Here’s Adam Darowski’s notes, Mike Linksvayer’s notes, Angela Beesley’s summary, and my notes.

Evan spoke strongly in favor of the ethical commercialization of wikis. He believes that non-exploitative models for wiki commercialization are not only possible, but essential, to a healthy Internet ecosystem. His talk focused around wiki content providers, the open community or open content model, rather than open source software, but I heard some of the same themes come up in Elisa Camahort’s panel on open source evangelism and Ed Cavazos’ panel on Open Source business models. Jon Lebkowsky touched briefly on ethical and economic issues in his article for the Austin Chronicle, You Mean Open Source Hasn’t Saved the World Yet?

At his Commercialization panel, Evan sharply criticized the “crowdsourcing” model which speaks of content creators as “suckers,” with the disrespect a carny gives to his mark. I liked Evan’s basic message, which was a good reminder to all Internet companies to keep it real. My perception at this point is that some sectors of the open source community are suspicious of any commercialization and of capitalism itself, which people like Marc Fleury attribute to sour grapes. But insofar as I believe it’s possible for capitalism to be ethical, it’s heartening to hear so many companies and especially wiki companies thinking hard and talking openly about the ethics of their business models.

SXSWi will be a wild mixture of fun and work and information. Last year, it was beyond “drinking from the firehose” – it was more like wrenching the whole hydrant open and dancing in the streets. Within 10 seconds of meeting nearly anyone, we’d be exchanging weird snippets of information, tools we use, sparky Great Weird Ideas, blog addresses, and more. My favorite moments from last year were all “hallways conversations”, like the one I had with David Swedlow about blogging identities and contexts: you don’t wear your bikini to the bank, but it’s perfectly okay to own a bikini. Or the moment where Brian Oberkirch and I realized we were both huge fans of a complicated and obscure (in the U.S.) Cuban novel, Tres Tristes Tigres. I’ll get the chance to connect with a lot of my fellow BlogHeristas. And last but not least – the parties and music events.

SXSWi 2007, Sleater-Kinney show

I’m looking forward very much to going to How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture; Non-Developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell Me Why I Care, especially to hear Elisa Camahort and Annalee Newitz; Evangelo Prodromou’s Open Community talk; Revisiting Commercial Open Source Business Models; Kathy Sierra’s opening remarks; and… the most fun-sounding of all… Your Web Application as a Text Adventure.

My panel this year, Fictional Blogging, has nothing to do with Socialtext or wikis. But in a conversation with Marrit Ingman, a reporter for the Austin Chronicle, I had some thoughts on fiction, book publishing, and wikis:

I’d love to see companies blog creatively from the points of view of minor characters in a novel or other fictional series. I don’t want Harry Potter’s blog; I want Dobby’s blog or Neville’s or Pansy Parkinson’s. Or better yet, a network of interlinked fictional blogs and worlds. In the imaginary world, we aren’t limited by truth, reality, history, or time. We can have Genghis Khan blogging in dialogue with Caroline Ingalls and Picard and two hundred different Harry Potters, with real people thrown in the mix. A smart company would interlock its fictional worlds and information and allow participation from everyone in the building of alternate fictional realities. There’s a lot of energy in fanfiction, for example. This energy should be welcomed by media owners and publishers, who need radical change in their approach to intellectual property.

Book publishers aren’t getting wikis either – or not enough of them are getting it. Every book needs a wiki. Every book needs a blog, but I’d push it further and say that they need wikis too, or blikis.

Wikis have enormous creative potential. Socialtext uses wikis and blikis to increase collaboration and speed up communication in big corporations. Corporate wikis change the ways people talk with each other at work, or how they approach the definition of a project. But novelists and creative writers need to play with wikis in many other areas. Wikis are clearly useful for worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy. But let’s push it further. We could write a novel as a wiki. Someone should do that for Nanorimo! Maybe they already have. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it, if you’re a writer? It challenges the idea of authorship, authority, style, and the singular voice of the genius artist. That’s a fine challenge with a ton of potential. When we get our first excellent bestselling novel written by a wiki collective — better yet by an open collective — we’ll know that our society’s approach to the generation of knowledge has evolved. Fans groups of particular wikinovel hive minds will spring up. Literary criticism will change as well, and academia’s resistance to collaboration will have to evolve to change with the times.

Book publishers aren’t getting how to make a blog into a book. What is the value of the book? Besides editing the blog and making it portable, a book should annotate. The book of Riverbend’s blog, for example, could have been a fantastic book rather than just a nicely bound bundle of printouts. Add information, indexes, annotation, glossaries, diagrams, geneologies. Enrich a blog; don’t just print it. Publishers think people don’t want footnotes. They’re wrong. When people love a world, a character, or a subject — or a blog — they want to know everything, on different levels. A generation that grew up listening to DVD commentary tracks and writing complex Wikipedia articles about Pokemon characters does, indeed, love footnotes, and the option for depth of information they provide.

I haven’t read Wikinomics yet, but from my first glance through it and a look at the book’s web site, wiki, and blog, they’re a great model for the publishing industry. I’d like to see not just every person with a wiki page – but every book.

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!