Events/FOSDEM/2014

FOSDEM (Brussels, Belgium) is probably the best community driven FLOSS event in Europe. It's massive, chaotic and fun.

2014
1-2 February: https://fosdem.org/2014/

Devroom proposal
Submitted on September 15. Processed by FOSDEM. Decision pending, to be known by October 1.

Wikis
Wikis are essential tools for online collaboration, open knowledge and free software. They are everywhere: from the mainstream Wikipedia to a myriad of public, academic and corporate knowledge bases and personal sites. And most of them are open source software.

Wikis became popular thanks to the edit button allowing users to create and modify text-based web pages easily. Over the years wikis have become more powerful, handling more content types, allowing better look & feel, championing localization and integrating (sometimes) with other tools. The development continues, with hundreds of professional and volunteer contributors specializing in this area.

There are also challenges: the competition from (mainly proprietary and corporate) social media and online office tools, keeping up with UX expectations from users, editors and sysadmins, compatibility across different wiki engines and other publishing tools, collaboration between wiki projects...

Scope
Wikis DevRoom is a place to showcase and discuss We want to focus on sessions for a technical audience including savvy editors. Basic introductions for end users and long tutorials are out of scope.
 * new features, especially exploring areas beyond plain text editing
 * compatibility and integration with other tools and services
 * lessons learned from deployments, surveys, research...
 * cross-project collaboration

Format
One day, one room. Most of the schedule will be filled with sessions of about 25 minutes that have gone through a call for participation.

We will have a WikiWiki Hour of lightning presentations (5 minutes each).

We will organize a panel session with representation of key wiki projects - the specific topic to be decided as we confirm the participants.

Organization
Quim Gil (MediaWiki) and Vincent Massol (XWiki) will coordinate the devroom. Both have experience participating in FOSDEM and organizing similar activities.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the upcoming Wikimedia Belgium chapter and Wikimedia Germany support this initiative and will help with volunteers.

The XWiki project and the Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware Foundation support this initiative and will volunteer help. Jean-Marc Libs "Jyhem" will act as liaison for the Tiki Community. He has experience participating in FOSDEM (twice), is a Tiki developper and a member of the tiki admin group.