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Conference: Designing Cyberinfrastructure for
Collaboratio
I want to share the following conference announcement from Brian
Kahin of the University of Michigan describing a very relevant and
exciting event to be held in Washington DC January 29-30, 2007.
This conference builds on themes presented at an earlier conference
held at the National Academies which I believe a number of
CNI-announce subscribers were able to attend.
Full details are available through the links in Brian's
message.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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On January 29-30, 2007, the Committee for Economic Development,
the Council on Competitiveness, the National Science Foundation,
Science Commons, and the University of Michigan will hold a conference
on "Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and
Innovation" at the National Academies Building in Washington.
This conference, the fourth in a series on the economic implications
of advancing digital technology and infrastructure, builds on core
problems and issues examined two years earlier in "Advancing
Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy" (
http://advancingknowledge.com;
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11009 ).
Investments in cyberinfrastructure, like early investments in the
Internet, will pay off not only in research and education but in the
development of new products and services. Yet as
knowledge-enabling infrastructure becomes more powerful and extensive,
its users interact with traditional rules and practices for
controlling and deriving value from knowledge. Patents,
licensing, contracts, and other mechanisms and institutions have also
become more potent, pervasive, diversified, and complex. Some
fear that these controls may favor older, more familiar models of
innovation such as solitary invention, R&D pipelines, and discrete
product technologies – perhaps to the detriment of new
cyberinfrastructure-empowered models that are more collaborative,
cumulative, or distributed in nature. However, “private
ordering” mechanisms, such as patent pools, data commons, open
standards, and a variety of private and public licensing models, have
arisen as ad hoc infrastructure to support new forms of innovation and
common interest in the development of new knowledge and new markets.
How well do these emergent mechanisms and institutions work? How
well do they succeed in mitigating tensions and conflicts among
different practices and policies? To what extent can or should
they be incorporated into the broader knowledge-driven vision and
design of cyberinfrastructure?
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