Regular attendee of London Wiki Wednesdays

Harry Wood homepage

Currently I do geo-web development as a freelancer and as part of a team at placr.co.uk

My wiki interests:

Most recently I've been one of the main people trying to cope with an expanding userbase on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/ the wiki used by the OpenStreetMap project. This wiki has very much crossed the tipping point. It's no longer a challenge of encouraging adoption. It's more about desperately trying to keep the wiki tidy! Having said that there is a curious adoption challenge around getting key developers and mappers who are active in OpenStreetMap, to feed into the wiki without being put-off by vast armies of less knowledgeable wiki editors fiddling with their work.

The OpenStreetMap project itself is described as "the free wiki world map", an editable map system modelled on wiki processes, but applying these to vector-based map editing systems. I have given a talk about this. See London wikiwed 7 October 2009 - what happened, and my blog post. I've been hugely active in this project, and for a time I even had a paid position doing this at CloudMade . Wiki Wednesdays was actually partially responsible for this career move. It gave me an itching desire to find a more interesting web job.

Other wiki experiences:

• Responsible for install and upkeep knowledge management extranet wiki (MediaWiki) at a medium sized IT consulting firm.
• Used to be the webmaster for the Imperial College Canoe Club website which is using MediaWiki

I used to be a 'wiki wanderer' wandering between different wiki projects, seeing what's out there, and where I can contribute. I think this has given me a good insight into the social dynamics of wikis, the different stages of the wiki lifecycle, and practical experience of the ways some different wiki engines work (from a user perspective at least)

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