Category — General

Berlin Declaration on open access released. The long-awaited Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was released today by the Max-Planck Society, European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO), and the participants in the conference on
Open Access to the Data and Results of the Sciences and Humanities (Berlin, October 20-22, 2003). The signatories include representatives of the major scientific and scholarly societies in France and Germany. Institutions that did not participate in the drafting may still sign it by contacting Dr. Stefan Echinger.

Excerpt: “The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access….Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society. New possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet have to be supported.”

The Berlin statement draws its inspiration from the Budapest Open Access Initiative and bases its definition of “open access” on the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. [Open Access News]

discourse.net on The Practical Nomad. Michael Froomkin (Professor of Law at the University of Miami, moderator and contributor to ICANN Watch, and part of the Freetotravel.org team), has some especially kind words about my fledging efforts in his blog at discourse.net. Check it out, especially… [The Practical Nomad]

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the practical nomad blog looks like it will be very useful

NeL: The Next Great MMORPG?. 20 Oct 2003: O'Reilly tells us aboutNeL.”Like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies, Ryzom will be a massive multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) with immersive 3D graphics. The developers have released Ryzom's engine code under the GNU General Public License. … NeL (for Nevrax Library) is a toolkit for the creating 3D-graphic MMORPGs or similar online game-play environments that require both client and server code. It runs on the Linux and Windows OSes, using OpenGL as its 3D graphics renderer [RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix]

Project Gutenberg Publishes 10,000th Free eBook [Slashdot] I interviewed the guy who set this up for a long feature story for New Scientist back in 2001 (I filed the story on September 10… thereby ensuring that the story got bumped as a cover story, which it was supposed to have been. Sigh!). What a great project this is. And under threat, like so many good initiatives, by increasingly ridiculous copyright limitations. [[ t e c h n o \ c u l t u r e ]]

AoIR 4.4.1. ON QUALITATIVE RESEARCH What follows is an extensive set of notes on this morning's discussion, entitled “Broadening Options and Raising Standards for Qualitative Internet Research: A Dialogue Among Scholars.” The panel was convened by Annette Markham (UIC), and included Nancy Baym (Kansas), Susan Herring (IU Bloomington), Shani Orgad (London School… [Planned Obsolescence]

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this looks like it was an interesting panel, i missed it though.

for those who have not yet heard, the next Association of Internet Researchers conference, Internet Research 5.0 will be held at the university of sussex in the u.k. it should be excellent. i have no further information though at this time.

VeriSign CEO calls for commercial control of the Internet. As if the SiteFinder controversy was not hot enough, VeriSign's CEO Stratton Sclavos is now calling for commercial control of the Internet's root DNS servers and for ICANN to be reorganized as a trade association. Excerpts from an interview with… [InternetPolicy.net]

dumb, very dumb, possibly even a stupid suggestion, extremely stupid.

went out in toronto to the cn tower 360 restaurant for dinner, wow. i'm not really afraid of heights, as much as extremely judgemental toward experiences where the obvious connections to the ground are removed for the sake of a thrill.

There were 11 of us from aoir and we went up the elevator which has a slight vibration as it flies up the tower, air pressure on the crossbars or something, anyway my legs were rubber for a few minutes. anyway, we approached the table and there was suddenly a huge pause about who sat by the window, so i went and sat down, monica across from me, knowing that in the end, i wouldn't like the proximity of a 1500 feet drop, but would survive, so i sidled in next to the window and sat down.

i talked to monica a bit, and to niels, niels is trying to get his book on virilio published in the u.s. it sounds very interesting and i suggested a press or two that he wasn't thinking about.

on the walk over to the tower, i talked with gitte about maybe giving a talk to her mobile gaming class when i am in copenhagen. i'll be arranging my trip a bit more probably next week.

anyway, i sat next to bev, leslie's mom at dinner and had a nice conversation there once i managed to get my adrenaline under control from coping with the 500 meter drop less than a foot from my chair. for a few minutes it was 'watch jeremy use monosyllables' time but that passed and it was a wonderful dinner.

I put the cover for our book, the aoir annual vol. 1 out d on the assumption that everyone was now near fast home connections. the cover looks good.

the sunday part of the conference was fun, we had two sessions and brunch. I talked to andrew at the brunch a bit while i was breaking up conversations here and there, i also talked to sal a bit about qut and brisbane. I popped my head into the Rob Kling rememberance panel, that was nice, the paper seemed good. I also watched a bit of the trust panel and popped my head in on the guys talking about discourse of trust in open source communities. i then proceeded to wander around the common area, talking to colleagues, etc.

later i talked with matt about my trip to australia in the spring, looks like i might get to fly across to perth and cause some trouble, that'll be fun;)

now what i really have to do is knock out my dissertation, no doubt about it, and no screwing around, just plugging until it is finished. I have to hang out in Cath a bit more anyway, for various reasons, so that's what i'll do.

let's see here, after the gala dinner I went out with jenn and mia and friends, that was fun, we went to the elephant and something bar around the corner from the hotel. jakob from aarhus and ildiko from hungary(i think, apology if i mess it up ildiko). in any event we stayed until closing

currently, i'm sitting in the toronto airport at b7, i finished a bad cup of coffee, now i'm waiting for my flight, at 9:40

Gala Dinner. I actually went to my first conference Gala dinner… and enjoyed it. I know it was the general crowd, and… [Just differently intelligent.]

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This is what makes it a great conference other than the papers and scholarly discussions.

pleix. “pleix is a virtual community of digital artists based in paris. some of us are 3d artists, some others are musicians or graphic designers. this website is the perfect place to share our latest creations.” [note: quicktime] [MetaFilter]