I tried to build a panorama of the beautiful lecture hall (not that successfully.. but it’ll give you an idea):

Day 1, keynote by Martin Tisne

Martin Tisne is director of policy at Omidyar Network, he recently worked on the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, a collaborative of leading funders committed to strengthening democracy by empowering citizens to hold their governing institutions to account.

Day 1, keynote by Farida Vis

Farida Vis led the social media analysis on an academic team that examined 2.6 million riot tweets, analysing the role Twitter played in the 2011 UK riots, as part of The Guardian newspaper’s groundbreaking Reading the Riots project.

Day 2, keynote by Philip Thigo

Philip Thigo is part of a dynamic team at the Social Development Network (SODNET) that works on developing mobile and web-based technologies aimed at strengthening the role of citizens and civil society in the strategic use of technology, especially in developing countries. Philip is a Co-founder of INFONET, an initiative rooted in SODNET that is credited with empowering African civil society, governments and citizen’s to better engage in enforcing budget transparency, service delivery demands and election monitoring.

Day 2, keynote by Ville Peltola

Ville Peltola looks into the horizon at IBM as a Director of Innovation in the Chief Technology Officer’s team in IBM Europe. During the past few years Peltola has been focusing on smart cities and emerging civic innovation with open public data. En passant, Peltola mentioned a nice finnish experiment: Restaurant day

Day 2, open democracy session, Yannick Assogba

Yannick Assogba talked about IBM many bills, a bills visualizer. Other intersting links:
http://www.research.ibm.com/social/
http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=3419
http://historio.researchlabs.ibm.com/histories/98

Day 2, open democracy session, Miriam Reitenbach and Ivonne Jansen-Ding

Miriam Reitenbach and Ivonne Jansen-Dings from Waag Society in Amsterdam. Waag Society, institute for art, science and technology, develops creative technology for social innovation. The foundation researches, develops concepts, pilots and prototypes and acts as an intermediate between the arts, science and the media. Waag Society cooperates with cultural, public and private parties.
Keywords: “technology and citizen engagement”, ‘tapping into citizenship’

Day 2, open democracy session, Tangui Morlier

“Let’s reverse Lessig’s metaphor and pretend that Law is Code! Do we make the law more understandable if we use developper’s tools? […] Our project, realized with people from Sciences po university, aims to transform all these steps to open legislative data, in order to track the evolution of a law through a version-control system (such as Git) where each amendment will be an individual commit.”
Keywords: “lawrence lessig: code is law”, “towards a ‘gitlaw’”

Day 2, commons for Europe launch

http://commonsforeurope.net/, based on http://codeforamerica.org/
The actual site: check codeforeurope.net and the call for fellows

Day 3, plenary with James Cameron

James Cameron, very inspiring talk (video anywhere?)
“build more cooperative enterprises”
“human beings are not good at dealing with risks that come slowly from afar”
“break things up into manageable bits”
links:
http://grist.org/climate-change/on-titanic-anniversary-james-cameron-says-climate-change-is-our-menacing-iceberg/
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/115433-report-director-james-cameron-calls-climate-change-skeptics-swine
http://www.theccc.org.uk/news/features/1107-profile-on-james-cameron-vice-chairman-of-climate-change-capital
https://twitter.com/Jamesogradycam

Day 3, plenary with Tiago Peixoto

‘mobilisation of citizens’
‘participatory budgeting projects’
‘reduce participation costs’
– high participation costs => low participations
http://www.worldbank.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bank
http://theconnectedrepublic.org/users/Tiago%20Peixoto
https://twitter.com/participatory

http://www.allourideas.org/

Day 3, Open democracy panel, Finnur Magnusson

Finnur Magnusson was the CTO for two large scale crowdsourcing events in Iceland as well as the Icelandic Constitution Council.
– http://www.gommit.com/
– http://chamber.com/finnur-magnusson
– http://sociable.co/social-media/how-iceland-crowdsourced-the-creation-of-its-new-constitution/

“Using Twitter (@Stjornlagarad), Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, the group asked for opinions and suggestions about what should be included in the document and how they would like their country run. In total, over 16,000 user-submitted comments and proposals were sent to the Council through their website. ”

in iceland parliament computers are banned

– lessons learned: open participation => ++ quality in democracy
– written a new constitution in 4 months / no problems with online mobs etc..

Day 3, Open democracy panel, Tanja Aitamurto

Tanja Aitamurto
http://cci.mit.edu/ MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Seeclickfix:
http://seeclickfix.com/
http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/blogs/agahran/2012/09/seeclickfix-crowdsourced-local-problem-reporting-community-news

Day 3, the European citizens initiative

http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/welcome
http://www.citizens-initiative.eu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens’_Initiative

Carsten Berg, General Coordinator of the ECI Campaign; Democracy International
http://www.citizens-initiative.eu/?attachment_id=257

Day 4, Open Fablab session, Tomas Diez

Tomas Diez: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/MIT/863.08/people/Tomas/

Barcelona: http://www.smartcitizen.me/en/
http://fablabbcn.org/

‘distribuite personal manufacturing’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Industrial_Revolution
http://www.thethirdindustrialrevolution.com/
http://www.economist.com/node/21552901

Day 4, Open Fablab session, Peter Troxler

Peter Troxler
http://petertroxler.org/
http://opendesignnow.org/

Day 4, gran finale with Hans Gosling

Gapminder.org
Keywords:
“People have a completely wrong idea about the world”
“First we used the most stupid argument we had: rational argument”
“Companies are more serious than the public sector: companies go down”
“The old west has a to ic combination of ignorance and arrogance about the world”
“Don’t talk about what you want to do, just prototype fast”
“Climate is too serious for letting environmental activists deal with it”
“don’t do only small apps x your garden or bicycle … Its the big thing”

Rosling presented the television documentary The Joy of Stats, which was broadcast in the United Kingdom by BBC Four in December 2010.[6]
http://blogs.elpais.com/periodismo-con-futuro/2011/05/hansrosling.html

The first excerpt is about the ‘ever-changing meaning of ontology’. The second one instead is a graph depicting the role of ontologies in semantic systems.

And the good news is: you can get a pdf pre-print for free!

Abstract
Several technologies are emerging that provide new ways to capture, store, present and use knowledge. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive introduction to five of the most important of these technologies: Knowledge Engineering, Knowledge Based Engineering, Knowledge Webs, Ontologies and Semantic Webs. For each of these, answers are given to a number of key questions (What is it? How does it operate? How is a system developed? What can it be used for? What tools are available? What are the main issues?). The book is aimed at students, researchers and practitioners interested in Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence, Design Engineering and Web Technologies.

During the 1990s, Nick worked at the University of Nottingham on the application of AI techniques to knowledge management and on various knowledge acquisition projects to develop expert systems for military applications. In 1999, he joined Epistemics where he worked on numerous knowledge projects and helped establish knowledge management programmes at large organisations in the engineering, technology and legal sectors. He is author of the book “Knowledge Acquisition in Practice”, which describes a step-by-step procedure for acquiring and implementing expertise. He maintains strong links with leading research organisations working on knowledge technologies, such as knowledge-based engineering, ontologies and semantic technologies.

The seminar’s title is “reasoning about knowledge‘. Fagin and others, lead authors in the area, define its scope as follows (get the PDF here):

As its title suggests, this book investigates reasoning about knowledge, in particular, reasoning about the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each otherâ€s knowledge. This is the type of reasoning one often sees in puzzles or Sherlock Holmes mysteries, where we might have reasoning such as this:
If Alice knew that Bob knew that Charlie was wearing a red shirt, then Alice would have known that Bob would have known that Charlie couldnâ€t have been in the pantry at midnight. But Alice didnâ€t know this . . .
As we shall see, this type of reasoning is also important in a surprising number of other contexts. Researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, from philosophy to economics to cryptography, have all found that issues involving agents reasoning about other agents†knowledge are of great relevance to them. We attempt to provide here a framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable.

For the moment we’ve just been clarifying our language and the conceptual tools we need to move on to the core issues. But the discussion’s been really lively, so I guess I’ll keep posting about this. A simple map of the recent meeting is online for public consumption :-)