Please save the date for the Yale Information Society Project’s (Yale ISP) third annual Access to Knowledge Conference (A2K3) on September 8-10, 2008. In a departure from precedent, please note that this year’s conference will take place in Geneva, Switzerland.

The location and timing will enable this year’s event to reach out to a significant new audience of international organizations and policy-makers, particularly those delegates preparing for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) General Assembly a few weeks later.

This year’s conference will also benefit from the collaboration of several new partners in contributing to the conference program, which will feature three days of plenary panels, as well as workshops for smaller working groups.

As in past years, A2K3 will be free and open to the public, but advance registration will be required; more information will follow in due course. We hope you will mark your calendars and plan to join us in Geneva this September.

American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property; Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law; and Women and the Law Program present the Fifth Annual Symposium on IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections. The symposium explores the rich intersection of intellectual property law and feminist theory.

April 4, 2008

10am-4pm

American University Washington College of Law

4801 Massachusetts Avenue, NW * Washington, DC 20016

Room 528

This year’s symposium will feature presentations by Anita Allen, Rebecca Tushnet, Olufunmilayo Arewa, Séverine Dusollier, Kevin Collins, Ian Kerr, Laurence Rassel, Debora Halbert, Kevin Jerome Greene and Francesca Coppa.

A full listing of paper topics and commenters, webcast address, registration and travel information, and copies of published symposium papers from prior years is available at:
http://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/ipgender.cfm.

We encourage you to register at
http://www.wcl.american.edu/secle/cle_form.cfm
if you plan to attend so that we may accurately gauge demand for the complimentary lunch we will serve to all attendees.

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?).

Recommendation 8

“To improve government’s responsiveness to demand for public sector information, by July 2008 OPSI should create a web-based channel to gather and assess requests for publication of public sector information.”

http://barcamp.org/BarCampPOIR8 on *12th January 2008*,
Spey & Ness Rooms, City Inn, 30 John Islip Street, Westminster, London.

From an announcement of the event:

Since beginning to accept requests for re-using PSI through the discussion forum on the OPSI website, we’ve been given some very helpful feedback by users and learnt quite a few lessons about how the eventual service will need to work. The forums have served a useful purpose these few months but are clearly insufficient going forwards.

We’ve opted for a BarCamp format as the most open, participative and democratic way to engage with potential re-users. We’ve a venue arranged and an outline agenda – but really we would like the re-user community to shape the event.

Way cool.

BILETA 2008

Glasgow Caledonian University on 27-28 March 2008

_____

“Law Shaping Technology; Technology Shaping the Law”

Security and privacy of our personal information is becoming a central theme with the rise in social networking technologies and user generated content. Have sites such as Facebook and YouTube responded in a timely and effective manner to safeguard our data, whilst promoting our rights to free speech.

Technology to combat crime, and technology used to assist in crime will also be a central theme of the conference.

Proposals welcome for novel streams and expressions of interest to convene a stream in any of the following areas:

Social networking
Web 2.0 & Law 2.0
Criminal Justice
Technology & Crime
Privacy and data protection
Legal Education
Copyright and IPR

There will be a prize-winning competition for the best Postgraduate Student Paper presented at the conference.
Full papers accepted and presented at the conference will be put forward for peer-review or special editions of journals in the areas of law, technology and education.

Email abstracts of approx 500 words in MS Word or PDF to m.bromby@gcal.ac.uk before 11 Jan 2008. Early submissions and suggestions for streams (including convenors) are welcome.

As speed geeking is, well, geeky, we should consult the ultimate web geek source Wikipedia for a definition:

A large room is selected as the speed geeking venue. All the presenters are arranged in a large circle along the edge of the room. The remaining members of the audience stand at the center of the room. Ideally there are about 6-7 audience members for each presenter. One person acts as the facilitator.

The facilitator rings a bell to start proceedings. Once proceedings start, the audience splits up into groups and each group goes to one of the presenters. Presenters have a short duration, usually 5 minutes, to give their presentation and answer questions. At the end of the five minutes, the facilitator rings a bell. At this point, each group moves over to the presenter to their right and the timer starts once more. The session ends when every group has attended all the presentations.

One of the presentations that I would like to see — either at a speed geek for open access to law or for another event — is someone describing Open Journal Systems. OJS is an open source software platform for journals created and maintained by the Public Knowledge Project.

It isn’t just a website for your journal:

OJS Features

1. OJS is installed locally and locally controlled.
2. Editors configure requirements, sections, review process, etc.
3. Online submission and management of all content.
4. Subscription module with delayed open access options.
5. Comprehensive indexing of content part of global system.
6. Reading Tools for content, based on field and editors’ choice.
7. Email notification and commenting ability for readers.
8. Complete context-sensitive online Help support.

This is the kind of think that can greatly improve open access to law in the UK. There are many open access law journals that use home grown software and spend time reinventing the wheel. This kind of effort can be saved and spent where it matters — high quality content available under an open access policy.

I’d also like to see speed geek booths on:

• Open content licensing — making sure that the journal doesn’t maintain restrictive copyright policies.
• User reps — people from outwith the legal profession and the academe that want access to law articles.
• Open access — someone to discuss the benefits of open access policies.
• Roll your own open access — someone discussing self archiving and sites like SSRN.
• Successful open access journals — success stories from current open access UK law journals.

I’m sure that you can think of some others. Interested? Leave a comment or contact me.

http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/details.cfm?id=165

Networked Information Processing and Changing Attitudes to Privacy in
Japan

Thursday 14 February 2008 15:30 – 17:00

Dr Andrew A. Adams, School of Systems Engineering, The University of
Reading

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS.
This event is open to the public. If you would like to attend please
email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk

Dr Adams has just spent nine months visiting Meiji University in
Tokyo, funded by a Global Research Award from the Royal Academy of
Engineering. He has been studying the legal and social approach to
privacy of electronic data in Japan and will present some of the
results of his study.

There is a myth amongst researchers that there is no such thing as
‘Privacy’ in Japan. Dr Adams refutes that and shows that the advent
of networked information processing of personal data has brought
Japanese attitudes to information privacy to a highly similar
position to Western attitudes.

Grounded in the social and psychological literature about Japan, this
work explains the emergence of Japanese legal protection for personal
data in recent years.