Workshop: Wikisym 2012 Doctoral Research Consortium

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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.