[Semediawiki-user] Announcing EMWCon: May 25-27 in New York City

[Yaron K. <ya...@wi...>]

Hello everyone,

Many of you have probably been wondering what's going on with SMWCon this
spring. I'm pleased to announce that, though there will not be an SMWCon,
there will instead be an EMWCon - an Enterprise MediaWiki Conference - to
take its place. It will happen on Wednesday to Friday, May 25-27, 2016, at
ITP in New York; which you may recall is the same location as the SMWCon in
Spring 2013.

This event does not mean that SMWCon is going away. Rather, we're trying
something different this time, and we'll see how it works out. My guess is
that, whatever happens, the next event will again be an SMWCon - most
likely in Germany - but that's another story.

Why the change? The idea - which I confess was mostly mine, although other
people have expressed approval - is that EMWCon is a natural outgrowth of
SMWCon. Already at SMWCon events, there is a lot of discussion about the
use of MediaWiki as a whole, plus extensions that aren't directly related
to SMW. Add to that the fact that there has so far never been an event
devoted to the use of "enterprise MediaWiki" in general - despite the fact
that it's the world's most popular wiki software - and it seemed like a
good idea to try to expand our conference to fill that gap.

The structure of EMWCon will, I expect, be quite similar to SMWCon. The
range of topics and speakers will probably be broader, though I would guess
that Semantic MediaWiki will still play a major part.

And if you're wondering: the Open Semantic Data Association, which has been
in charge of SMWCon since 2011, has expressed approval of this conference
as well; though we haven't established yet whether OSDA will be in charge
of EMWCon, legally and financially speaking.

To read more, and if you want to sign up as an attendee (there's no
official registration yet), please see here:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/EMWCon_Spring_2016

I hope to see you in New York in three months!

-Yaron