Back from Wikimania 05 in Frankfurt

This is it, end of two full days spent at Wikimania in Frankfurt ! It has been a great experience, deep diving in the wiki world, but how difficult in the same time to sumarise, as this world is different from the blogosphere...

I have to say what really estonished me is the diversity of age of attendees: such a wide scope of people from 7 to 77 years old is quite impressive: from teenagers to grey hair... ;o) and a strong mix of nationalities also.

The event was really well organised, a full staff was dedicated to the conference, welcoming and introducing each speaker, the logistic and the tech were also at their best, it was possible to connect via Wifi everywhere and at any time, so really, you did a good job guys, congratulations !

Now that Wikimania is behind, I definitely believe that there is still a boundary between the blogosphere and the "wikisphere" and that those two worlds are not yeat ready to collaborate, they are even not ready to communicate. This kind of conference has nothing to compare in it's messages with a "blogging conference", the topics are definitely not the same or even parallele, more over of course, Wikipedia was always somewhere in the air...

The main words here were "sharing", "collaboration", it's certainly about content mainly and connections then, but not at all about participatory communication as it usually is the case as soon as you attend any "blogging conference". I am underlining this difference precisely because it was my first major conference in the wiki world, so I've been sensitive to it but this is certainly not a surprise for anyone used to the "wiki world".

The speech were also not focused on the corporate world and the "how to bring wikis in corporations", which was part of my expectations, but of course, again, it was Wikipedia's event, so it's not estonishing.... Just a little bit of desillusion for me... ;o) Let's remind the opening conference from Jimmy Wales and his "manifesto" for a free world, you would never have seen that in any blogging conference....;o)

The main common point I can see between both world is the bottom up disruptive approach. Wikis or blogs are rarely launched by CEOs...

Ross Mayfield CEO of SocialText was the only one to talk about the use of wikis in the corporate world and he is also certainly the only one to gather blogs, wikis, IM, RSS and email in one single workspace (ok Jotspot also has that kind of solution, but without the same positioning). Ross shared some case studies with us, talking about companies as,for the most well-known of them, Nokia, Dredsner Bank...

Sunar Shah also talked a bit in his presentation about how to use in an efficient way wikis to first of all gather the information and then use other wikis for the following steps of any project development. (see the link in my previous post).

So certainly a great experience to having been there.

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