WICSA Conference Wiki:About
From WICSA Conference Wiki
WICSA is a working conference and working sessions have long been a tradition at previous conferences. They have been used to collect examples of existing best practices; identify characteristics of existing methods and techniques; identify gaps in the state of the practice; and propose new techniques to fill those gaps. This year again we are using wiki software as a group communication mechanism that allows users to freely create and edit web page content using any web browser. Wikipedia [1] is our model for on-line collaboration. The goal is to encourage ideas about software architecture to evolve as an ongoing discussion among members of the software architecture/WICSA community in the form of wiki entries.
Prior to the conference, the wiki software is used to capture position statements from working session registrants, and used by organizers to plan, coordinate and disseminate information about upcoming sessions. During the conference, the wiki software is intended to be used to:
- capture questions and answers from the plenary sessions
- capture discussions from the working sessions, workshops and BoFs
- contribute a position or observation on the state of the practice in software architecture
- comment on, or raise new, software architecture themes for WICSA
The results will be used as input to summaries to be published in the conference proceedings. The Wiki site will remain available after each conference.
The WICSA Wiki site grew out of dicussions among members of the IFIP Working Group 2.10 on Software Architecture and an experience of using wiki at WICSA 2004, the fourth Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture. The WICSA Wiki has been used for each subsequent WICSA conference.
Researchers at IBM Watson Research Center assisted in visualizing the collaborative process through use of the History Flow application that has been developed to explore the effectiveness of wiki as a collaborative tool.
A third of the conference attendees registered as users and two of the conference working sessions used the site to capture preparatory materials, discussions during the session, and post-mortem results and reflections.
The consensus at the conclusion of the conference was to keep the site running until the next WICSA conference to gauge interest in maintaining a community site.
While the “party” metaphor was appropriate for the conference, we decided we would need a new main page and metaphor for a permanent site. One metaphor suggested was that of a Software Architecture Online Library consisting of many rooms:
- Reference room (bibliography, dictionary, FAQs, etc)
- Café (chat room, discussion forums, etc.)
- Current events (listings of conferences, etc.)
During an active conference (which spans the period of a few weeks before, the days of, and a few weeks after the conference), most of the site is locked down to conference participants only. Please feel free to contribute your ideas and expertise. If you have any comments or suggestions, please discuss them here.
