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February 22, 2007
Getting ready for the PLA Symposium
I'll be attending the PLA Spring Symposium in San Jose, CA from March 1-3, so if you're going to be out there and want to meet up, send me email, or leave a comment on my MySpace page, or a message on my Facebook wall, and let me know.
Kathleen Hughes (my boss at PLA) has been awesome about looking at the schedule and laying out possible event coverage aside from just the sessions. I'll be posting a "coming soon"-ish post to the PLA Blog about The Plan, which is a nice mix of podcasts of sessions and interviews, as well as your plain old text coverage of the event, pictures, and eventish stuff.
I will be doing a wiki workshop at the symposium which will cover the public library wiki project (a.k.a. the PLWiki, my name for the project), as well as a general overview of what wikis are, how they work, and an overview of some free options. It's much like the continuing education class I taught at Southern Connecticut State University back in December, but shorter, and a bit less formal.
I'm guessing that, for the size of wiki we want, we might end up paying some money somewhere. While my temptation is to set up a MediaWiki install (as it is the same software that runs Wikipedia, and would be one more step towards getting librarians involved in Wikipedia in general, which would totally rawk my world), I'm also concerned about maximized, broad-range usability. So, it might behoove us to consider another option that might be a bit easier to use, and may cost a little money to host.
Whatever we use, a big part of the plan will be to make copious use of the Community Portal section of the wiki (the place to go to find out what projects need help in a wiki, and what you can do to help), and to make a big deal about the Community Portal from the home page of the wiki. I've got a plan laid out in my brain about how we'll go about organizing the wiki to start, which is a bit more formal than most wikis work, but I consider it learning from the evolution of the wiki to apply some planning tactics ahead of time. It's like seasoning a garden plot before planting: lay good basic groundwork, and everything else will take care of itself organically (to a certain extent).
Ah, the wheels, how they turn in the technology planner's mind and make smoke...
We're still tossing around all sorts of issues, which will be discussed at the session (the time and location for the wiki presentation is still being firmed up, but I'll post the update here and to the PLA Blog as soon as I know). We'll also be recording the session to podcast, so if you can't be there or you miss it, you'll be able to listen to the audio later.
February 22, 2007 11:07 AM