Well, I was an honorary one for a night at least. Sarah Blow invited me along to last night’s London Girl Geek Dinner to speak about Wikis and Wiki Wednesdays, along with Angela Beesley, who told us all about Wikia. When Sig got invited to one of these things last year (guys can only be invited as a guest of one of the girls) I was most envious, but now I’ve caught up. It was good one to speak at. The whole thing was videoed by one of Nicole Mathison’s friend’s, Dominic Tristram, and the affair was recorded by Radio 4 for Woman’s Hour. I had to speak a few gender oriented sound bites for Angela Saini, the BBC reporter in question (who has just started her own website), so I may make it on to the programme. The sad truth is that most geek, technology or entrepreneur oriented networking events and meetups that I go to rarely have more than a 10% female audience. It was a delight to have the tables reversed and to be one of the token males. While I was writing up my piece yesterday it occurred to me that although we’ve had that kind of girl attendance at our Wiki Wednesday’s, not one has got up to speak, although I did try to get Angela to speak for us at the last one. We’ll rectify that at the next event on 6th June at Conchango.
It was an excellent event, although maybe it would have been good to have more time for networking after the formal presentations. I met some really interesting people. Sarah, and Nicole do the organising, and are both very passionate and altruistic in their approach to what they do. Angela has worked for the Wikimedia foundation, but now heads Wikia, which is extending Wikimedia and creating and supporting wiki resources on any topic, assuming it’s a community resource that is both sustainable over time and not for profit. I met Eileen Brown of Microsoft who manages the IT Pro Evangelist Team, and we talked about technology blogging, and I hope she can supply the SharePoint speaker I need for the next Wiki Wednesday. Sadly she won’t be able to make it herself, because she is out of the country. I met Hugh Macleod face to face for the first time. That’s the nature of Internet. You can have an online relationship with someone, maybe working with them regularly for some time, and then you meet them in person. Hugh’s quite a character, and we had a some great conversations about what he does for Stormhoek and Microsoft, the world of advertising that he left, and the island and croft he is going to eventually buy somewhere up in the Hebrides. I now have an image of Hugh as the wine swilling, chain smoking blog marketer, mixed with the immortal Highlander of the clan Macleod in my mind. I met Cathy Thomas, an SAP technical consultant from Bluefish, someone who does intranets and wikis for First Choice, Dr. Andrew Jaffe an astrophysicist from Imperial College, Dominic of the Filter (without his video camera) and Nageela Yusuf of alt-consultants. As well as business, Nageela and I talked about her ideas for using wikis and social networking to involve younger people in politics. I’m looking forward to hearing more from her on that.
During Angela’s explanation of Wikia, their approach and the technology, which dipped a little in to Wikipedia, Hugh asked why Wikipedia doesn’t use advertising on their site to help fund the initiative. His argument is that users are savvy, and realise resources like Wikipedia need to be funded. They are used to adverts alongside their Google searches. Why not treat them as grown-ups and add this to the funding/business model. Hugh thinks the community won’t mind. However, some of the audience reacted a bit negatively to Hugh’s question and follow ups. This goes to the heart of the Wikipedia philosophy. They are a non-profit foundation funded by donations and believe that their readers would question the independence of an article if there was some related product advert alongside. Later over a few glasses of wine the debate continued. Dominic said that he wouldn’t contribute to Wikipedia if they advertised, because in his eyes that would turn them in to a commercial organisation. Sarah thought that Hugh “just doesn’t get it“. This is one where I can see both sides of the argument. I wouldn’t have an issue with advertising on Wikipedia as an extra revenue stream, assuming it didn’t change the non-profit nature of the foundation. However, I can also see how the ads can get in the of the way of independence and complicate things for contributors to a community resource. If we ever restart our StartMEup wiki for small business, start ups and entrepreneurs, we’ll continue with the site being advertising free.
Sarah and Nicole couldn’t get to our last Wiki Wednesday, so this was a good way of combining the two. All in all this was a great event, and I hope some of the girls get to our next session on the 6th of June.
Sarah blogged about it here, and the Roland with the WikiMonkey did too. You can check out the rest of my Flickr pictures of the event.
