[wos] First Monday conference

[Volker Grassmuck]

[Forwarding from First Monday]


FM10 Openness: Code, science and content
Making collaborative creativity sustainable

First Monday's tenth anniversary conference, 15-17 May 2006
at the University of Illinois at Chicago

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, peer­reviewed 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 nearly 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. This conference celebrates
First Monday’s tenth anniversary. The first issue of First Monday appeared
on the first Monday of May 1996 at the International World Wide Web
Conference in Paris. Altogether, 658 papers have been published in 115
issues, written by 783 different authors from around the world.

The conference is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation (http://www.macfound.org/), the Open Society Institute
(http://www.soros.org/), and the University of Illinois at Chicago
(http://www.uic.edu/).

Watch First Monday's Web site for further details on registration and the
conference program.



==========

This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to
  The SPARC Open Access Forum.
To post, send your message to <SPARC-OAForum at arl.org>.
To unsubscribe, email to <SPARC-OAForum-off at arl.org>.
To switch to digest mode, email to <SPARC-OAForum-digest at arl.org>.
To switch to index mode, email to <SPARC-OAForum-index at arl.org>.
Send administrative queries to <SPARC-OAForum-request at arl.org>.