Last week was a busy one for the US National Science Foundation (NSF). In addition to the meeting reported on by IGP Partner Milton Mueller, NSF also convened a major conference from 29-30 January entitled, “Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation.” The meeting, organized by Brian Kahin and sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development, Council on Competitiveness, National Science Foundation, Science Commons and the University of Michigan, was held at the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C. The meeting focused on using the Internet to create geographically distributed environments for collaborative research, and the soci-technical challenges involved in such approaches. The program, which featured an interesting array of speakers from industry, academia, government, and international organizations, was organized around five themes: (1) Infrastructure for Knowledge and Innovation; (2) Designing the Virtual Organisation; (3) Technology-Enabled Knowledge; (4) The Ecology and Design of “Open,” and (5) Public and Private Cooperation. Most of the slides, supporting documents, and additional resources are also made available on the conference website. The meeting was attended by IGP Partner Derrick Cogburn, as well as GigaNet member Nanette Levinson. Interestingly, at one point a speaker from the audience expressed his desire to “keep fighting those who want the UN to take over the Internet,” which was met with limited applause from the participants.
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Derrick, Interesting comment about “the UN taking over the Internet.” I am curious as to how a meeting on cyberinfrastructure got into this territory. And recognizing that it's probably off limits to reveal who said this, I would nevertheless ask whether you see this attitude as prevalant among academia and government officials in science, or just ISOC/industry types.