First Monday Conference
FM10 Openness: Code, science and content
15-17 May 2006, at The University of Illinois at Chicago
Celebrate ten years of First Monday!
Register at http://numenor.lib.uic.edu/fmconference/
Send an abstract or paper to http://numenor.lib.uic.edu/fmconference/
Thanks to a grant from The Open Society Institute, as many as 20
participants from developing countries may receive grants to attend
the Conference. An application form can be found at
http://firstmonday.org/fm10/FM10_OSI_fundreq.doc. Deadline 10 February 2006.
The Conference is generously sponsored by The Open Society
Institute, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The
University of Illinois at Chicago University Library and The
Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology
(MERIT), University of Maastricht.
About the Conference
Recent years have seen a strong interest among academics, policy
makers, activists, business and other practitioners on open
collaboration and access as a driver of creativity. In some areas,
such as free software / open source, sustainable business models
have emerged that are holding their own against more traditional,
proprietary software industries. In the sciences, the notions of
open science and open data demonstrate the strong tradition of
openness in the academic community that, despite its past successes,
is increasingly under threat. And open access journals and other
open content provide inspiring examples of collaborative creativity
and participatory access, such as Wikipedia, while still in search
of models to ensure sustainability.
There are clear links between these areas of openness: open content
often looks explicitly towards open source software for business
models, and open science provides through its history a glimpse of
the potential of openness, how it can work, as well as a warning of
the threats it may face. Finally, open collaboration is closely
linked to access to knowledge issues, enabling active participation
rather than passive consumption especially in developing countries.
Despite these clear links, there has been surprisingly little
thoughtful analysis of this convergence, or of the real value of the
common aspect of open collaboration. In particular, while open
source software - due to its strong impact on business and on
bridging the digital divide - has drawn much attention, it may
provide false hopes for the sustainability of openness in other
areas of content that need careful examination. The conference --
FM10 Openness: Code, science and content - Making collaborative
creativity sustainable -- provides a platform for such analysis and
discussion, resulting in concrete proposals for sustainable models
for open collaboration in creative domains.
The Conference will draw on the experience of First Monday as the
foremost online, peer-reviewed academic journal covering these
issues since May 1996. Not only has First Monday published numerous
papers by leading scholars on the topics of open collaboration, open
access, and open content in its various forms, it is itself an
example of open collaboration in practice: for a decade, the journal
has been published on a purely voluntary basis, with no subscription
fees, advertising, sponsorship or other revenues. The success of
First Monday is demonstrated by thousands of readers around the
world, downloading hundreds of thousands of papers each month.
For more details, contact Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor of First
Monday at e...@uic.edu. We look forward to seeing you in Chicago!
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