Community discussion

SMWCon Fall 2013
Community discussion
Talk details
Description:	Traditional SMWCon feedback session for all participants
Speaker(s):	Markus Krötzsch
Type:	Discussion
Audience:	Everyone
Length:	30 minutes
Video:	not available
Keywords:
Give feedback

This is the community discussion that we traditionally have at the end of SMWCons. It is meant to gather feedback about the conference, but also about the general development of the community. Issues can be proposed for discussion below.

Issues to discuss

Link to live notes: http://openetherpad.org/p/smwcon2013

Feedback for the conference

• (Future) length and format: 1 tutorial day (two tracks) + 2 conference days (single track).-

- have concurrent track during tutorial day (perhaps mutually exclusive stuff, like developer stuff)

• Topics and contributions: how to steer/select program? shorter/longer talks?
• Other organisational feedback or tips
• Demo Sessions? Give people more time to show their demos. Similar for poster sessions.
• More time for coffee breaks and for people networking
• Maybe even have two tracks for conference?
  • Two tracks will probably not help people NOT to miss interesting talks
  • From 100 participants, two tracks are sensible
• Some talks could be compressed.
  • Yury: We did not want to confuse people with many different length of talks.
    • Samuel: Maybe a middle-way possible (10 and 20 min talks)?
• Have specific tracks/sessions for sysadmins, users...
• Reviewing process was rather new at this conference. Instead of changing talk length, we should help people increase quality of talks.
• Jeroen what have you proposed? I missed it.
• Arrange date and location of conference earlier to make things easier for international travellers with slow fund procurement processes
• Mention topics of interest in calls for participation and have deadlines etc.
• Bird of a feather discussions.
• consider putting the conference against the weekend in a "standard way" (starts on Monday or ends on Friday), so attendees can plan either pre or post conference activities for extended discussions
• Should all talks be mainly related to SMW or shall we still mix talks about Miga, Wikidata, etc.?
• Keep talks about competitiors and related tools integrated, even if it's just update talks by main contributors to the other projects such as WikiData
• General feedback of talks:

   Good and equal quality of talks! Still: What is easiest to listen to, is when someone talks like they would when explaining something to a friend, rather than "declare done work for their teacher" True, but this is a matter of eloquence and practice. Absolutely! Just as a feedback for future (would have been happy to learn that, few years ago :) ).

Community and promotion

• Facilitating the promotion of SMW:
  • In universities - consider a Bundle targeted to Universities that "solves" a problem to jumpstart adoption and create next-gen of maintainers +1
  • In the industry - list of major organisations that use SMW for critical functions such as project management (go through the various small consultancies)
  • Suggestion: Forming local meetup.com groups +1
• Measuring the success of Semantic MediaWiki - promote linking of SMWs
• Positioning of SMW: do we position ourself as Semantic web project or Enterprise platform?
  • If you wanted to promote SMW as an Enterprise platform you will need to extensively rework your website and documentation to be more professional. It has some competition that is far better marketed even if it is less powerful. Consider some major enterprise issues such as legal records management requirements and how wikis affect those. SMW+ was useful for demonstrating to budget holders, even if Ontoprise disappeared.
• Sources of funding the development for SMW tipjar/NPR model/semi-annual Wikipedia drive (banner)/Foundation grants

  * apply for GSOC separately instead of piggy-backing on MediaWiki??

• Seems to be difficult to find people knowledgeable in SMW. We should do training.
• How to tell more people about SMW?
  • John: News releases circulated around
  • Alex: People are looking for solutions to problems not for SMW per se
• Maybe learn from other Open Source projects such as Drupal.
  • Maybe create own skin for SMW?
• We need designers/UI/UX!
• Markus: Maybe we also need to think about how we MediaWiki a bit out of Wikipedia and to support it somehow (towards our needs)
• see how OKCon (Open Knowledge Conference) is run. Its not just about CKAN, but the whole idea of Open Knowledge

Technical issues

• Wikidata integration

- Yes!!!
- integration is planned and encouraged
- some old notes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/SMW_and_Wikidata

• Integrating ACL into SMW core
  • may be possible but is probably very difficult because it would require alignment with all other parts of SMW
  • MediaWiki Relese Management Team is planning to push that forward, e.g., using Micro Funding.
• PostgreSQL support (which also allows PostGIS support as a bonus)
  • Realistic target. Last bugs should be doable with current testing infrastructure
  • More expressive query functionality (GIS) however is a different topic
• Using GitHub similar to the way Open Knowledge Foundation GitHub works (not Gerrit). For prospective future developers too, some way to get "credit" for commits in their GH profile
  • Pro and cons, has been discussed a bit during Tutorial day.
• Include a GraphViz installation in Composer ... < Composer is for installing PHP libraries into PHP projects, not things on the OS level (a simple easy one click install of everything required to get full functionality out of SMW+ including the SRF, then)

Next SMWCon

http://discoursedb.org/smwconspring2014/

See also: SMW community growth