For those who are not being able to join this year conference - Wikimania 2010 in Gdansk, below you can find some important information.

Schedule of the sessions, panels, workshops, events, and their description is on this wiki page, with the program at a glance.

All sessions are broadcast via iStream and you can watch livestreamings of the sessions here, grouped in four halls for each session during the day. This also refers to concerts, after presentations events, and tonight is the screening of the movie “Truth in Numbers” followed by a panel discussion.

If you are tweeting, using Identica or other microblogging service, use hashtags #wikimania2010, #wikimania. The irc channel is #wikimania-gdansk on freenode#wikimania2010.

Tomorrow, Sunday 11 July,  I’m chairing the morning sessions, two panels: Academic Researchers and Wikipedia, in Concert Hall, so tune in.

Wikimania is an annual international conference dedicated to Wikimedia projects around the globe (including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikimedia Commons, and MediaWiki).

This year’s conference will be held July 9-11, 2010 in Gdansk, Poland at Polish Baltic Philharmonic. For more information, visit the official Wikimania 2010 site: http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/

The event is a community gathering, giving the editors, users and developers of Wikimedia projects an opportunity to meet each other, exchange ideas, report on research and projects, and collaborate on the future of the projects. The conference is open to the public, and is a chance for educators, researchers, programmers and free culture activists who are interested in the Wikimedia projects to learn more, present and share ideas.

Wikimania 2010 will be a mix of submitted talks, open space meetings, birds of a feather groups, and lightning talks. Submissions will be discussed and selected in an informal process on the wiki.

As being said in the Call for Participation, this year Wikimania will offer three tracks for submissions for members of wiki communities and interested observers to share their own experiences and thoughts and to present new ideas: people and community, knowledge and collaboration and infrastructure track.

Deadline for submitting workshop, tutorial, panel, and presentation proposals is May 20th. Submit yours, no less than 300 words, and see you in July in Poland.

Tomorrow morning I’m giving an hour session for scientists who want to get familiar with collaborative social media tools for the next three days of the conference ScienceOnline. You know that I was here [Research Triangle Park, NC] last year and that we talked about open access in developed countries, now with the accelerating emerge of participative media and their implementation in everyday life, including any professional area, there are some normative literacy’s to embrace in order to communicate and contribute.

As you know I do not make presentations in a classic way, with too much (or none) words, since this is workshop I will be demonstrating and practice interaction with people who are attending and will report, network and micro blog in the next few days on ScienceOnline2010.

Slide are uploaded on SlideShare, they are fluid in a way that I will add/talk/address/demo other issues on social media, social networks and science.

Those who’ve been lucky to attend and participate  [moi!] in this years conference SciOnline09, traditionally held in January every year at Research Triangle Park, Sigma Xi, NC/ US, could learn a lot, meet great interesting people from different fields of activity and brainstorm, create new ideas, projects. Even more, all good things after the conference at the beginning this year happened to me on and afterwards, so it’s time to get enough supplies of positive creative energy for the next year and meet, hear, talk with fantastic folks coming from all over the world.

ScienceOnline 2010, the fourth annual conference on science and the Web, will be held on January 14-17th, 2010 at Sigma Xi in the Research Triangle Park. Take a look at the program and keep informed about news and updates.

I’m coming to give a session on Social Media for beginners, how to use Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube etc. the smart way, find other scientists, journalists, IT folks there and collaborate. Then use these tools over the next two days to connect with others at the conference, to report from the conference and expand your circle of online scientific friends.

There’s little place left so register here for the ScienceOnline2010, see who’s coming, and join me.

Before I go for so long needed vacation [still have no clue where exactly yet, send suggestions, so far got invitation for Corfu and other places around Serbia], I have tons of things to finish.

Some of then include ICSD2009 and reviewing process, finalizing AP using foaf that implied people and networking, following up with EU/UN project, fare-welling with Rome, moving (again), and then coping with administration due to my future travels and government [I may hire an assistant in Belgrade],  writing chapters for a book in co-authorship (more about it here) ideally at some beach, and then heading to UK.  My contact email will be active as I’ll have the Interwebs here and there, but don”t expect prompt reply (especially if I’m on the beach).

For Serbian readers, I have blog in Serbian and feed to subscription. Yes – expect more updates on social media focused on Serbia, follow me on Twitter for daily updates, and here’s the latest interview with me on Scienceblogs.com – enjoy and happy summer!

Sometimes 140 characters are not enough to express myself,  so I decided to write a reflection on motivation, organization, tasks, projects, and how I keep up with everything as reply to your questions, rants on Twitter.  It’s summer time and most of you are on vacation, but some of us still work.

Many of you asked, complained on Twitter how one keep up with parallel projects, tasks, many of you fell overwhelmed, stressed out, etc.  Some of you asked how do I attack tasks, and what does it mean. Just to let you know you are not the only one in the multitasking/parallel projects/tasks executing. But somehow I found my way to keep up with many projects that I face every day (no rocket science). Here are simple things I practice in order to attack my tasks and not vice versa, and they work for me so far.

Emails.
What I’m practicing lately is to see just few relevant emails per day, not zillions as it was in the past.
I managed to teach my inbox to behave. How? I’ve filtered emails within topics or subjects and labeled them. So only important emails I receive on daily basis from the people I expect emails, others skip the inbox and end in labeled folders, I check them once or twice per week. This way I put off less pressure on checking incoming emails or seeing emails I don’t want to see. It’s such relief. My inbox at this point is two unread emails, in the past was over 1900 emails [Flickered that]. This also refers to social network sites messages or notifications: if you send me e.g. Facebook message, I am ignoring that. It’s true I have several hundred unread FB messages, but please use email to contact me.

Smart Phone.
I’ve set up my smart phone to remind me on tasks, meetings when I’m not working on computer and when I’m on the run. Those are usually tasks, and meeting memo’s related to my work. Off work,  I use to-do notes that remind me on what I have to do or buy. I am not yet on Alzheimer’s, but when I go shopping I like to see the list. There are too much things in my life that at least I can have PDA on my phone. Also, I like analogue post-it task notes. All my 2009 I’ve planned in 2008 post-it wall with different colors schema [seen on Flicker].

Meetings.
Regarding the scheduling the meetings I usually set up 50% of the schedules and other 50% I am scheduled. For the second I prefer to have heavy mental work in the morning hours after 10 am (not a fan of early morning meetings) and they should be brief, right to the point (if they are not presentations that require an hour or so). I respect other people’s time and I want mine to be respected. My meetings attention span is short and I am advocating that in 10-20 minutes you can have perfect meeting if you get straight to the point(s).

Deadlines.
I’m not perfect in this department. I go to the extremes: I’m either before deadline or after (few days), but what I do is always let people know in advance that I will be late, and ask for some extension. It’s simple as that.

Parallel projects.
Many of you complained “oh how am I going to do several things at the same time, I am overloaded”, etc. The thing is you cannot (read: can not) do several things at the *same* time, it is physically impossible and can be very stressful. What I do is I set up the priorities through the day of those projects I’m currently doing. For those at my job,  I am lucky because I usually work with a person on consultations and this helps me alot. I always want to hear second opinion and to see if I’m going in the right direction. I handle things much faster and better if I am communicating with someone on certain issue and then I withdraw and do the rest on my own.
If some of the data or outcome depends on the others (group of people or institution(s) ) – you have to learn how to make people to do things you want them to do. I make them do things by saying what I expect from them or saying directly what they should do, usually I suggest social media tools to facilitate their work that reflects my projects. I cannot tell you how I do this – I guess it goes with practice and time, being tactful with people, but for those who don’t meet my professional needs or not being prompt, I am ruthless here and use TCP/IP slapping device ::smile::
If some things become critical and are not done because of the non promptness of the others, in that case I don’t have time to loose or wait for them. I either ask someone else or simply take things into my hands and got my task/project done. I am happy, others are happy.
Great deal of tricks I’ve learnt and have to thank to my supervisor who taught me how to enjoy my work, deal with different kind of people [story on crocodile and the chick] and if needed to torture them ::giggle::
I wouldn’t accomplish all alone for some grande projects, esp. those that requires consultations if i didn’t cooperate with my lovely colleagues (call me lucky and blessed to work with fantastic people), and people from my area of work from world wide institutions.

Communication.
When dealing with lot of projects, it is important to communicate and what is the most important to be honest and state what you can or cannot do or accomplish at certain time. I always analyse situation before I accept something. I talk to people. Face to face. Emails. I tell them what I think, show them my concerns, ask for their opinion.

One more thing to finish with: I am not perfect. I have six grande “projects” to accomplish before fall (October 2009), one book included – the one I didn’t start to write yet and I have due soon. How I am going to handle all that? I don’t know, I just follow my schedule and do one thing at a time at that certain moment. It is true I don’t party every night,  yes- my personal time management is pretty messy, yes – I don’t have time for workout, yes- I have to improve my nutrition system, yes- I need to start to do yoga again, yes -many times no free weekends, but what really keeps me going on here is the awareness that I’m doing/creating good things that have great future on the longer run plus I’m interacting with interesting people, and I’m getting more and more experienced in life (not only work) – which is the greatest asset. Above all – I am trying to enjoy myself.

I would like to read the feedback from you: what works for you and what not? How do you keep up with all the tasks you have? What part of your life suffers? What would you like to change?