EMWCon Spring 2016

The Enterprise MediaWiki Conference Spring 2016, or EMWCon Spring 2016, will be held Wednesday to Friday, May 25-27, 2016, in New York City, USA. It will be a three-day conference featuring discussions of topics related to "Enterprise MediaWiki", i.e. the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies, non-profits, governments and other organizations. It is open to anyone who uses, or would like to learn more about, MediaWiki within organizations.

EMWCon Spring 2016 will be located at ITP, or the Interactive Telecommunications Program, a part of New York University.

This conference will be the first of its kind. It is a spinoff of the similarly-named Semantic MediaWiki Conference, or SMWCon. SMWCon is a twice-yearly conference, which occurs in the spring and fall; it will not be having a Spring 2016 event, in order to make room for this EMWCon. EMWCon and SMWCon are not that different from one another: they are both three-day events, and, despite its specific name, SMWCon tends to also have discussions that cover the use of enterprise MediaWiki as a whole.

Event details

 * Dates: Wednesday, May 25 to Friday, May 27, 2016
 * Times: 9 AM - 6 PM
 * Location: Tisch School of the Arts. New York University. 721 Broadway (between Waverly and Washington Place), 4th Floor, New York, NY 10003
 * ITP is located on the 4th floor of 721 Broadway, New York, NY, near Union Square.
 * Access information: There is an elevator – After presenting photo ID, go to the 4th floor
 * Subway:
 * 4, 6
 * N, Q, R
 * Bus: M1, M2, M3, M5, M8, M14A, M14D, X1, X7, X9, X10, X12, X17, X27, X28
 * Parking: Two commercial garages, one block north at 445 Broadway.
 * Hashtag: #EMWCon

Organizers
The organizers of EMWCon Spring 2016 are:
 * General chair: Yaron Koren
 * Program chair: Peter Woudsma
 * Local chair: Pharos

For any issues, you can contact the organizers on the talk page, or email Yaron at [mailto:yaron57@gmail.com yaron57@gmail.com].

Schedule

 * Wednesday, May 25: talks + "Community Learning Night" with Wikimedia NYC
 * Thursday, May 26: talks + dinner/social event in the evening
 * Friday, May 27: "Create Camp": collaborative work on technical and other projects

Registration
To register for this event, go here:
 * EMWCon Spring 2016 at Eventbrite

Sign-up
Also, feel free to add your name to the informal registration signup, below:
 * 1) Yaron Koren
 * 2) Peter Woudsma
 * 3) Rachel Garrett
 * 4) Lex Sulzer
 * 5) Cindy Cicalese
 * 6) Pharos
 * 7) David Mason
 * 8) Joel Natividad
 * 9) Jason Bock
 * 10) G. Brett Miller
 * 11) Laurent Alquier
 * 12) Greg Rundlett (aka freephile)
 * 13) ☠ MarkAHershberger ☢ (talk) ☣ 15:59, 9 April 2016 (UTC)
 * 14) CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 15:16, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
 * 15) Anja Ebersbach (talk) 12:29, 26 April 2016 (UTC)
 * 16) Scott Wray
 * 17) Angelika Müller
 * 18) Kris Field
 * 19) Peter B Meyer
 * 20) Frank Taylor, aka LawExplorer

Accommodations
Those planning to attend SMWCon should consider reserving a room as soon as possible, since hotels in Manhattan can sometimes get filled up quickly. The following are all moderately-priced hotels and hostels in the area around ITP:
 * The Bowery House, 220 Bowery (12 minute walk)
 * The Jane Hotel, 113 Jane St. (25 minute walk, 21 minutes by subway)
 * Riff Hotel Chelsea, 300 West 30th St. (35 minute walk, 16 minutes by subway)

Airbnb and the like are also possibilities, of course.

If you wish to share a hotel room with other attendees, or to stay with a local attendee, in order to save on costs, please add your name below.

Presentations
To give a talk, or lightning talk, at EMWCon, just add the proposed title, a brief description and your name, below:

Talks

 * "Semantic Forms: What's New" - an overview of recent changes and additions to the Semantic Forms extension (Yaron Koren)
 * "Enterprise Wiki Farms" - Requirements for hosting and maintaining a set of wikis for different functions in a business environment (Peter Woudsma)
 * "CWIX Wiki" - An example of a verification and validation platform for interoperability testing (Peter Woudsma)
 * "Semantic MediaWiki for everyone" - Helping an extended enterprise audience use Semantic MediaWiki for themselves (Jason Bock)
 * "Merits and Challenges of a Single Enterprise Wiki" - Discussion of the value and challenges of a single Enterprise wiki instead of a Wiki Farm (G. Brett Miller)
 * "Contracting with the GPL" - The legalese you're likely to encounter within the enterprise market (from the contract-management office) and how to reconcile that with the GPL-licensed software that the client is using in their business units.
 * "The WMF: the Ongoing Saga" - catching up on all the drama at the Wikimedia Foundation, and it might mean for MediaWiki (Pharos)
 * "Notifications in MediaWiki" - what's available and what's missing with user notifications in MediaWiki, including the Echo extension and an upcoming Google Summer of Code project (Yaron Koren)
 * "Technical Collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation" - What the Technical Collaboration team does and how we support MediaWiki (Chris Koerner)

Lightning talks

 * "Social Semantic" - Using Semantic MediaWiki for expanded profiles, article reviews and gamification (Jason Bock)
 * "MediaWiki as part of larger Enterprise Social Network" - Using MediaWiki as one component of an enterprise social network (G. Brett Miller)
 * "U.S. Federal government MediaWikis" (Peter B. Meyer)
 * "Open Data, Open Knowledge and Semantic MediaWiki" (Joel Natividad)