SIGOSSEE / JOIN

Over 60 participants turned up. One of the factors which made the meeting so interesting was the many different backgrounds of the participants including people form education, from government, the museums and other cultural organisations, software developers, publishers and more. How many times do you see Apple, Microsoft and Sun on the same platform talking about open content.

The other great feature was the format. There were two scene setting presentations - by me and Dai Griffith. the rest of the meeting was given over to a considerable number of 'micro presentations' on the following themes:

• Open Source in education and Best Practise for OSS in Schools - Swedish and Norwegian experiences
• Museums and network access to content
• Public media resources made accessible to educators
• The Open Access initiative and the crisis in research publishing
• Users creating content: Netbased open encyplopedias, Wiki concept
• Mixed Platforms and Environments
• Perspectives on open content
• Licenses
• Squeak and Croquet, a future operative environment for open work
• Open content and value creation
• Who defines ICT standards for education?
• Teachers, publishers and learning resources in educational processes.

I go to too many meetings and conferences and like many people, I guess, spend quite a lot of time daydreaming. This time I can honestly say I listened to every contribution. With so much on offer, it is hard to single out any particular input. But here are a few which have stuck in my mind.

There was a great presentation by Lars Aronsson on Projekt Runeberg.

I cannot remember if it was Mathias Klang or Karl Jonsson who presented Creative Commons but whoever it was certainly made his point!

I loved the presentation of the Squeak and Croquet open source software - check it out.

Kaj Arno from MySQL appealed for a dialogue with the education and training community.

Rolf Ekelund (hope I have the right name) made stunningly honest assessment of the future of educational publishing.

I recorded all the contributions and will try to start publishing them as audio files later this week. Soren has interviewed a number of the participants on video and we will be making this available as soon as the editing was finished. Last but not least Peter did a fine job collecting papers and presentations form the speakers and will be putting up a special web site reporting on the seminar.

I will post the url as soon as it is ready. Once again many thanks to Peter Becker for his great work organising the event. If only all meetings were as good as this.