This is funding to support a Doctoral Consortium (workshop) of approximately 8 promising graduate students from the United States (with perhaps some international attendees as well), along with a panel of about 5 distinguished research faculty mentors. The event will take place immediately preceding and in conjunction with the 8th International ACM Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (Wikisym 2012), which will be held August 27-29 in Linz, Austria. Wikisym is the leading international forum for bringing together researchers, practitioners, and entrepreneurs working on open collaboration and wiki-style socio-technical systems. The topic of open collaboration is the study of the forms of collaboration found in open source software and communities such as Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, Slashdot, and Digg. Such systems have shown the power to be gained from creating technologies that enable large distributed groups of people to collaboratively create artifacts of lasting value. Wikisym is attended each year by approximately 100 people from around the world; research presented at this conference is archived in the ACM Digital Library, and has been increasingly cited in recent years when referring to work in this area.
The goals of the Wikisym Doctoral Consortium are: to build a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world; to guide the work of the new researchers through advice from experts in their research field; to provide encouragement and support for the selection of research topics; to illustrate the interrelationship and diversity of research in the open collaboration area, and identify suitable opportunities for deployment and field evaluation; and to make it possible for promising newcomers to participate in the leading research conference in their field and to have an enjoyable and rewarding experience, thereby encouraging them to attend the conference in the future.
Broader Impacts: The WikiSym Doctoral Consortium has been successful in past years in attracting an international and interdisciplinary student constituency, bringing together the best of the next generation of researchers in open collaboration and allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers, who provide mentorship and expert feedback at a critical stage in their professional development (during the Consortium each student makes a formal presentation about his or her doctoral research). Student participants typically come from a wide range of programs and disciplines, including computer science, information, communication and sociology. They build ties to mentors that are often helpful beyond the time of the event; their diversity allows them to share broad research perspectives and learn about heterogeneous approaches to research under a shared topic of interest. The organizers will try explicitly to identify and include the broadest possible group of highly qualified participants, so that the student and faculty participants will constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, which will help broaden the students' horizons to the future benefit of the field. In accordance with CISE policy relating to funding of events held abroad, the PI has provided assurance that NSF funds will be used solely to support participation by students enrolled in graduate programs in the United States.
This funding supported US doctoral students to attend the 2012 Wikisym conference. This conference is a premier academic venue for people who study open collaboration systems, in particular related to sites like Wikipedia. The doctoral students who attended this event received assistance with travel and lodging. They spent the day before the main conference presenting work, receiving feedback, and interacting with more experienced researchers. The students attended an international meeting in Linz Austria, where they were able to receive feedback about their work, and interact with similar young scholars from other universities across the globe. In terms of the intellectual merit of this funding, in a post-conference assessment, the students reported that the feedback assisted their doctoral work. In terms of the broader impacts of this funding, several of the students have gone on to work in roles that benefit the continued production of open collaboration. For example, two of the students supported by the funding now work as research scientists for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia along with other publicly oriented websites. In that role, they work to broaden access to Wikipedia to more people, to improve the quality of Wikipedia and related products, and to think about the future of sites that provide public goods. In the time since this conference happened, all of the funded students have moved on to productive careers in either academia or industry, where they continue to work on topics related to the work supported by this grant.
