NEWS
28 Nov. 2011
LNCS proceedings is available online
25 August 2011
Pictures from the conference are now on the web.
15 August 2011
Online Registration is closed, but OnSite registration is possible.
26 July 2011
Updated info about venue, etc.
18 June 2011
Program published
13 June 2011
EXTENSION: Doctoral Symposium has the submission site open for 12 more hours (i.e., until midnight, Oslo time).
7 June 2011
Registration page for the main conference is open.
6 June 2011
Author notification: list of accepted papers available
03 June 2011
Submission site opened for the Doctoral Symposium.
04 Apr. 2011
Deadline Extension: submission deadline has been extended to 14 April (midnight Hawaii time)
29 Mar. 2011
Sponsorships are available for participants. See Registration page for details on eligibility criteria.
16 Feb. 2011
FCT 2011 is honored by the invited speakers:
11 Feb. 2011
One can use the FCT11 Posters for display with the purpose of advertising the FCT 2011 symposium.
31 Jan. 2011
A Doctoral Symposium event will be associated with the FCT 2011. See the specific CFP.
10 Jan. 2011
First call for workshops is out
15 Dec. 2010
First call for papers is out
14 Dec. 2010
Web Page is up
This page contains Patrick Michaud's comments regarding the "audiences" for which PmWiki was designed. As such, many people are reluctant to modify the page, because it is a statement of his opinions and describes some of the thought that went into creating PmWiki. (And we all thank him for that!)
Patrick's comments
I think of PmWiki in terms of two audiences:
- Authors are the people who generate web content using PmWiki, and
- wiki administrators are the folks who install, configure, and maintain a PmWiki installation on a web server.
In some senses it could be claimed that as the primary developer of PmWiki I should only have wiki administrators as my target audience, and that authors are the target audience for the administrators. But what really makes PmWiki useful to wiki administrators is that I've put a lot of consideration into creating a tool that is usable by authors, so I have to keep the needs of both audiences in mind as I'm designing and adding new features to PmWiki.
Within the authoring audience I see that there are "naive authors" and "experienced authors".
"Naive authors" are the folks who use wiki to generate content but may know next-to-nothing about HTML, much less style sheets or PHP or the like. Naive authors are easily discouraged from generating web content if they have to wade through markup text that has lots of funny and cryptic symbols in them. So, if we want a site with lots of contributors, we have to be very careful not to do things that will cause this group to exclude themselves from participating.
"Experienced authors" are the folks who know a lot about HTML and could write their content as HTML, but have chosen to use wiki because of its other useful features (ease of linking, collaboration, ease of updates, revision histories, etc.) or because they want to collaborate with naive authors. Experienced authors usually don't have any problem with documents with lots of ugly markup in them; after all, they already know HTML. Experienced authors are sometimes frustrated with wiki because it doesn't have markup that would let them do something they know they can do in HTML (e.g., tables, stylesheets, colored text, etc.). And, they sometimes have difficulty understanding why naive authors would turn away from documents that have lots of markup sequences in them.
For the wiki administrator audience--the folks who install and may want to customize PmWiki--their backgrounds and goals are often quite diverse. PmWiki is designed so that it can be installed and be useful with minimal HTML/PHP knowledge, but it doesn't restrict people who know HTML/PHP from doing some fairly complex things. For one, PmWiki allows a site administrator to build-in markup sequences and features customized to his/her needs (and the needs of his/her audiences).
The separate needs of these audiences are behind most of the PmWikiPhilosophies. The people who develop PmWiki software must continually keep naive authors in mind as new features are requested and proposed by expert authors and Wiki Administrators. Sometimes it may seem to these latter groups that it's okay to implement the complex features because "naive authors don't have to use them", but the truth is that if complex/ugly markup sequences are available then they will eventually be used by someone, and once used they become a barrier to the naive authors. So, if I see that a feature could become a barrier to a naive author I don't include it in the base implementation of PmWiki, but instead find ways to let Wiki Administrators include it as a local customization.
This page may have a more recent version on pmwiki.org: PmWiki:Audiences, and a talk page: PmWiki:Audiences-Talk.
