Wikimania 2006/Boston/Local support

This page is for people and groups interested in supporting a Boston Wikimania; both those who will be around next summer and those who can provide support beforehand. Add your name or organization below; additional information is welcome.

Individuals

w:User:AaronSw
Alexander (Sasha) Wait - Coordination with Harvard Medical School & Synthetic Biology
Dmharvey - grad student in math department at Harvard, author of Blahtex
Dowbrigade
Ilya. FREE field theory lessons. Language support: de/fr/ru, possible zh/es/ja/jbo/vn.
jacobolus - undergraduate student at Harvard College
Jessamyn - some coordination with local libraries, orientation materials and go-to support, on site refdesk
Karmafist - A Strong Maybe.
w:User:Reagle Now in Brooklyn, but lived in Cambridge for nine years and have some connections at MIT and Harvard
Sj, can definitely attend; couch space for 3 people. Language support: de/es/fr.
Tobacman. Links to academic social scientists, couch space for 3. Language support: es/id.
Steven Brewer - a bit west, but can probably help. Language support: eo.

Local enthusiasts not yet involved People who have expressed interest in the past, or are active & social wikipedians

Interest from a contingent of Wellesley girls
More local Wikipedians : ~40 from recent meetups/events (Rednblack, User:Cunctator, ...) or who don't attend such things (BCorr, User:dpbsmith, User:moink, ...), and 20+ from NYC and regional MA (like jessamyn above; Ed Poor, &c.)
Berkman interest : Fellows (partial help from 20 local fellows - active bloggers and journalists, lawyers and technologists)
Harvard Computer Society members (on top of those listed above, 6 people who will be around over the summer and are interested in "a field trip" to Wikimania wherever it is :-], especially the Hacking Days.
AndyCarvin (Digital divide & UN work. Busy but interested.)
Cyberfest Artists (Henry, Newbury street music project, &c. Loved the Cyberarts presentation in April.)
Henry Minsky

Amanda and Mal Watlington (Amanda: professional 'new media' PR consultant)
Beth Kanter
Bob Doyle (a/v tech expert; Skybuilders. Busy all fall.)
Bill/Recafe (experience w/ event rentals and in the real estate industry; might help with offsite events)
David Weinberger (blogger of infamy)
Ezra Keshet, developer & linguist
Josh Ain, developer
Luis Villa, Berkman hire, Ubuntu coder, and all-around frood
Matt DeBergalis, hacker and local political entity
Matthew Gline, President, Harvard Computer Society. Not a wikipedian perhaps, but an interested and dedicated citizen of the Internet.
Patrick Ohiomoba. (Harvard stats dept, computer services; wiki hacking on the side)
Shimon Rura, developer
Zak Stone (Interesetd in KM hacking)

Organizations

Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society Contact: Erica George, Colin Maclay
Providing free rooms, assistance, and publicity throughout the year. Also formal event status, which means brainstorming time with their brilliant Fellows, and staff time to help coordinate logistics with the university. (Exception: Renting Sanders Theater would be an additional $1000/day)
MIT Media Lab's Electronic Publishing Group Contact: Benjamin Mako Hill
Offering to reserve us major halls like Kresge Auditorium for large events.

Can provide tours of the media lab, a party in their two-floor atrium.
Harvard Medical School's Free Biology project; and Church's lab Contact: Alexander Sasha Wait
Offering funded grad student time; contacts in medicine. Some interest in directly funding MediaWiki development.

Active interest

Aside from the main supporting groups above. These are groups whose contacts have offered direct support, definite interest in working together, or help finding other sponsors. We may only be able to use a subset of this support, but it helps to have suggestions and ideas coming from many different channels.

Wiki use and Technology

The Harvard Computer Society (offered use of their well-networked office, and a bit of local tech support) Contact: Matthew Gline
The HLS Journal of Law and Technology [JOLT]. They 'live and die by the wiki', doing all publishing via a mediawiki-based publishing platform. A couple will be around in the summer; they are students interested in wiki apps & willing to help out. Contact: Jacquie Harlow, Eliz. Stark
The W3C (associated with the CS/AI Lab at MIT) responded with enthusiasm about Wikimania and is considering being a sponsor. Not sure how Boston-specific this is. They would certainly like to send a few attendees to a local event. Contacts: Ian (cf. also Joe Reagle)

Media

Schwartz Communications (media contacts, perhaps [extra] PR volunteers [some would help out with an event in any city]) Contact: Emily Fisher

Librarianship

Librarian networks - the local Special Libraries Association group and the Harvard Libraries would both like to lend moral support to the event. Maybe not as needed now as it once was, but still a show of good faith. A small group of reference librarians kindly offered to help with the information desk. contacts: jkb, Jessamyn W.

Education and free knowledge

MIT's Comparative Media Studies department (at least 2 interested grad students working on education, with time and funding to think about wikis & even Wikimania) Contacts : David Edery & Ravi Purushotma
MIT's Open CourseWare initiative. Contact: Vijay Kumar (recently also an advisor to India's National Knowledge Commission which sounds promising)
MIT's $100 laptop project. Interested in collaboration w/WP, integration of WP into their software package. Contact: Alan Kay (but very busy)
Ubuntu DVD creation w/multilingual Wikipedia imprint. Contact: Luis Villa (interest: Brett S.)
Freeculture.org (trying to set up a local chapter @ Harvard). Very interested in WP, unusual global community of students. Contact: Eliz. Stark

Other education and local schools

Planet-building collaboration (1 Haifa and 1 Boston school) among ~60 middle-school students, with extensive collaborative research and feedback. Project planned for this year, interested in better use of wikis for the project, or in coordination with an outside community of observers/commenters. Contact: Nitzan Resnick
The .LRN Consortium, working on building an education-portal package out of the open-source OpenACS platform, has a very crude wiki and would love to have a great one. They are both interested in linking up with MediaWiki. They have regular coding weekends in Boston; and could coordinate one with the Hacking Days. Contact: Tracy Adams, Caroline Meeks

Multilingualism and International collaboration

Kennedy School of Government [KSG]
Collaboration with ITAM, a major institute in Mexico; could sponsor students to attend. Contact: Federico Baradello (cf. Elis. Nuñez)

David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies [DRCLAS]; could sponsors a handful of students from Chile and all over Latin America. Contact: Federico Baradello (cf. Steve Reifenberg, director of the Chilean office)
Boston Court Interpreter students @ UMass Boston : director of the interpreter training program is happy to share the list of court interpreters; who all freelance. Also willing to distribute material about the conference, getting feedback from interested students; in case En<-->Es bilingualism is desirable. Contact: Dr. Leonor Figueroa-Feher

Some interest expressed

Groups showing nthusiasm but nothing further:

The MIT/CSAIL (Comp sci and AI labs), particularly their W3C offices. The W3C is considering financial sponsorship, liked the sound of Wikimania.
The Museum of Science (discussed hosting an evening event for speakers - sponsorship; want to talk more in person, meet other local WPans)
Local designers; 2 designers (incl. User:Brettstil) have offered help with site design (sponsorship)
The Science Commons of the Creative Commons, which has offices here, and an active synthetic biology group that is interested in directly promoting MediaWiki development (Talked Thurs, Sept 29. collab, possible sponsorship... have little in the way of funds)
IBM Watson Research in Cambridge is interested in working with us. They have a team of 2-3 people who work on wiki ideas; including the team developing the History flow tools. Martin Wattenberg is keen on doing something cool @ Wikimania if he doesn't have to travel too far. (collab, possible sponsorship)
The FSF Main offices here in Boston. collab; coordinated lecture offered (but is this what we need?). no word on sponsorship
The local librarian community; we have good connections with librarians at Harvard and MIT. (sponsorship)
- Several of the organizations jkb participates in might be very interested in helping to support this event, most likely through volunteer efforts, but perhaps with some funds. They would probably want their name used, however.

The usual suspects (no definite response yet)

Lycos and related projects
Novell and ex-Ximian groups (corresponding with their local MediaWiki guru who maintains their wiki instances)
Wolfram Research (collab? not sponsorship. Might work together in some way. Ongoing correspondence with S. Wolfram and Eric Weisstein.)
The City of Cambridge - progressive, into technology, interested in getting better information from/to their citizens. City councilmen who know about wikis are into it; can offer moral support, contacts with local cultural community bodies.

Speakers

Speakers who don't like to travel, or whom we would otherwise have to buy plane tickets, who are (often) in the area

Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon (global voices experts and resident Berkman fellows)
Jon Udell (author of the glorious 'History of the Heavy Metal Umlaut' video; couldn't leave home last year)
Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey (legal experts and Berkman managers)
Joseph Reagle (researcher in NYC; couldn't come last year; was too far)
Larry Lessig (comes to Berkman all the time for other reasons)
Martin Wattenberg (couldn't come last year b/c he had been travelling too much; might be seduced away from Boston this year anyway) and Fernanda Viegas, planning a serious WP research project this year
Yochai Benkler (creativity of the commons; lawyer and philosopher @ Yale)
[an OSI representative] (their offices are in NYC)