Conference Wikis – A Great Application
The rest of this week is on wikis. Last week I spoke the Professional Convention Managers Association on how they can open new lines of communication with blogs, podcasts, and wikis. Here is a bit on wikis. Next week I will cover conference blogs. While blogs are great to record the events, sessions, and the writers perspective, essentially a journalistic function, wikis can provide a broader space to allow for more in an accessible format such listings of resources, related events, things to do in the location, travel logistics, lists of attendees. Multiple people can add to these postings so it becomes a shared work space around everything to do with the event, including people’s spectives on sessions.
Here are four sample conference wikis that can give you a sense of the possibilities.
1. The Official Wiki for the 2006 American Library Association
(ALA) Annual Conference in New Orleans! - June 22-28, 2006 – as you can imagine given the expertise of the attendees this is a rich example.
2. PC Forum Eventspace - Socialtext's Ross Mayfield has put together an Eventspace wiki that is “chock full of information for this week's PC Forum. This seems like a great idea for anyone organizing an event.” Here are some of the categories: Announcements, Conversations (including Go ahead and start one on the 2005 Blog., IRC , Flickr Photo Stream, Technorati Cosmos of PC Forum, Ride Board). Other categories: Shared Notes, Sessions, People, Companies
3. 2006 O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) wiki – sample categores AttendeeList, Who is BloggingOSCON?, OScal a tool for discovering what's happening at oscon OScalMobile, Foscon Podcasts, WhereToFindSoda, EatDrinkManWoman, GettingAround, IRC and MySpace, RoomSharing, ThingsToDoAndSee, Weather forecast, SessionsOnGoogleCalendar, JobBoard. Note: the link to the wiki no longer works and I tested the one in Google and it no longer works
4. ASIST 2006 Annual Meeting Wiki (the American Society for Information Science and Technology) Since the conference is over, this wiki is now a read-only archive. Categories include (with some sub-categories in parenthesis) : Conference Program, Social Events, At the Conference (ASIST 2006 Meeting Blog | ASIST 2006 pictures on Flickr | Technorati Tags: asist2006), Austin Texas (Attractions | Restaurants | Hotels | Travel | Wireless Access | UT-Austin Wiki), Governance
As you can see there is a rich set of possibilities here. Meredith Farka wrote a very useful blog post, ALA Wiki: What I learned and what I’m doing with it, after the 2005 ALA conference - see above. Meredith also started, Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, "to be a one-stop-shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians." which deserves a separate review.
The KM World conference also had a conference wiki in 2005 but I could not find the 2006 one. 
enterprise wikis
I'm not sure if you're aware but the OSCON link takes the reader to a Kwiki error page.
Posted by: Dennis Howlett | January 17, 2007 at 12:40 PM
Dennis- Thanks. You are right. I went back to Google to get a good link and the one in Google also gets the same error. It did work whenIi wrote the post so this is something that I cannot correct at thi point. Bill
Posted by: bill Ives | January 17, 2007 at 01:18 PM
The KMWorld 2006 wiki is http://kmi06.pbwiki.com/FrontPage
The wiki was not well utilized but I added this page: http://kmi06.pbwiki.com/Wikis%20and%20Blogs%20Workshop
Posted by: Martin Cleaver | February 27, 2007 at 12:02 AM
It thinks works only not busy.
Posted by: Juno888 | May 21, 2007 at 01:56 AM