The UN based Rome agencies (FAO, IFAD, WFP) and the CGIAR organised a knowledge fair from January 21-22. This was the first of it's kind and could be considered an adventure.

This paper from my group was presented at Dublin Core 2009

From August 24-27 I participated in the joint meeting of AFITA (Asean Federation of Information Technology in Agriculture) and IAALD (International Association of Agricultural Information Management Sepecialists). https://afita.ac.affrc.go.jp/wcca2008/program-list.htm

I am finishing today my trip to India, which brought me to Kanpur (Indian Institute of Technology), Hyderabad (Verus, Kesevan Indstitute of Information and Knowledge Management, ICRISAT) and Bangalore (Indian Institute of Statistics, SMD Institute for Management Development). I gave keynotes at the AGROPEDIA workshop at IIT and at the New Gen Lib workshop at SMD-IMD, I gave two lectures to students and faculty at IITK.

I am participating at the moment in the conference titled above. The openig keynote from Bruce Perens was very interesting in discussing the economic importance of openSource software. He pointed out that no software development that is crucial for the business success of a company will be open, he called that differentiating technology, but that, in the moment a software goes on sale, is not differentiating any more. In these cases the openSource model shows to be more powerful.

On October 29 and 30 the Workshop on the European Information Space was hosted in FAO and co-organized by my team. The workshop brought together projects from two different directorates of the DG Information Society and Media. It was organized by the DILIGENT (Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology). Donatella Castelli from the CNR in Pisa, the DILIGENT coordinator succeeded in bringing together numerous projects funded by the EU in the area of Digital libraries and in the area of Research Infrastructure-