The chair of the event is Ian Brown, Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, with assistance from Lilian Edwards, Professor of Internet Law, University of Southampton, and Director of ILAWS, and Andres Guadamuz, Co-Director, SCRIPT Law and Technology Centre at the University of Edinburgh. As per usual, the co-chairs are Lilian Edwards, Professor of Internet Law, University of Southampton, and Director of ILAWS, and Andres Guadamuz, Co-Director, (of the newly re-branded) SCRIPT Law and Technology Centre at the University of Edinburgh.

So if you…

have a paper burning for the oxygen of publicity on any aspect of law AND technology, science, geek culture, blogs, popular culture, wikis, science fiction or fantasy, computer games, digital culture, gender on-line, MMORPGS, virtual property or online human personae, then come to the third edition, GikIII.

Abstracts are due by 15 July 2008 — see the GIKII site for details.

The holder of this tenure track position is expected to focus on trans-border protection of intellectual property rights and to co-operate with the other disciplines represented in the Cluster as well as with the junior research group on normative conditions of development aid policy. Applicants should have a strong record in international economic law and/or public international law.

Read more at the place formerly known as the Centre’s website.

The report by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to asses the information that they find on the web. The report ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future’ also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.

And for a representative sample of Keen, p 93:

But the problem is that the Web 2.0 generation is taking search-engine results as gospel.

Maybe part of the response to Keen’s view of the Web 2.0 future is, as this study suggests, education:

The findings also send a stark message to government – that young people are dangerously lacking information skills. Well-funded information literacy programmes are needed, it continues, if the UK is to remain as a leading knowledge economy with a strongly-skilled next generation of researchers.

Education of the end-user can make up for the lack of traditional gatekeepers in terms of user generated content (though I don’t think traditional media is dead). If people are only relying on, say Wikipedia, then this is of course a problem. In part because researchers should always go directly to the source whenever possible (though what does that say about me, not having read the report?).

Online identity – a persona that people establish in online communities.
The open social graph — a machine-readable description of the online identities in one or more online communities and the relationships between those online identities.
Always-on Internet access and mobile computing — results from the growing availability and use of personal, mobile computing devices (laptops, PDA, hand-held devices, mobile phones, etc.), coupled with increasingly pervasive wireless network access.

The last area fits in with some work I just had published this fall on wireless mesh networking in the Journal of Internet Law.

Anywho, start writing those grant apps!

I really like the new format, especially with a cover and professional looking table of contents. My definite compliments to the journal and its new editorial team.

December issue

SCRIPT-ed homepage

Among the many (great) articles, be sure to check out:

Emerging Global Networks for Free Access to Law: WorldLII’s Strategies
Graham Greenleaf, Philip Chung and Andrew Mowbray, pp.319-366
Those who value free access to law need to respond to the increasingly global nature of legal research, and the fact that most countries still do not have effective facilities for free access to law. The free access to law movement, centred around University-based Legal Information Institutes (LIIs), is assisting and encouraging the development of free access law facilities in many countries in the developing world. While doing so, it is also creating a global network of interconnected free-access legal research facilities on the Internet. This network is becoming comparable to the global legal research facilities provided by the multinational legal publishers.

My loyal reader will know that I’ve been trying to build up some momentum on open access to legal journals here in the UK, and would (very much) like to see an event in 2008 related to open access.