Lets Meet At Historic Oopslas Via Time Travel

Moved from LetsMeetAtOopsla

With OOPSLA (2001) just around the corner it is time again to ask who is going to be there and is it worth trying to get together some evening?

http://oopsla.acm.org/

What sort of things should we talk about?

StevenNewton -- I'm of like mind with GregVaughn (below) -- how to encourage people to explore and try contributing to an in-house wiki, and benefit from it's instant collaboration style. I'm also interested in a Palm wiki.

The second OOPSLA BOF has now come and gone. This year's BOF night (Wednesday) was really squeazed by the heavily attended ShowTrialOfTheGangOfFour.

Our BOF had a couple of dozen attendees, most of whom were happy to talk about techniques of launching wiki sites. Most agreed that a wiki needs about two months of careful attention before they take hold. During this time a founder would be wise to find something to put up on a new wiki site every day. The best sources are personal email, project documents or web searches.

A second subject of interest was addressing the proliferation of formatting rules. No answer emerged.

I hosted a birds-of-a-feather sesson devoted to wiki at OOPSLA in Vancouver and would like to do it again this year in Denver. This is one time wiki authors can meet and shared ideas without having to type or spell. Last time we talked about why wiki works for us, what it could do better, and what other versions are available. The talk so inspired one group from Caltech (under the umbrella of the Distributed Coalition) that they wrote their own just two days later. -- WardCunningham

These were the suggestions made before the 1999 oopsla ...

If you will be at OOPSLA'99 and think you might attend a wiki bof then let us know by signing here. Also tell us how you would like to see the time used.

WardCunningham -- I'd like to hear the authors and users of exotic features discuss how they change the wiki experience.
GregVaughn -- We've implemented a company wiki and I'd be interested to talk about how to keep it in use so it doesn't stagnate.
MichaelFeathers -- If anyone is interested, I'd love to discuss Wiki conventions.. WikiMaster-ing.. refactoring pages.
KentBeck -- I want to talk about creating wiki-based communities of non-nerds. And you want to do this at Oopsla?
RichardEmerson -- I want to talk about the use of Wikis to provide 'live' documentation for other systems (e.g. support manuals), and how useful a single-user 'PersonalWiki' might be on palmtops.
RonJeffries -- I'd like to talk about extracting publishable book-like content from a wiki after using it to draft and review material.
DanielEnting -- I 'd like to take part in discussing all the interresting topics mentioned above
SteveFreeman -- ditto

From the 1998 BOF description ...

A few hundred authors have been collaborating on wiki web pages about patterns and related programming ideas. A few dozen more have been implementing new versions of wiki. This session will give all these authors a chance to meet in person.