"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything..." (Richard Feynman)
I am part of a working group with the title "Global Research Library 2020". Goal of this group is to discuss and to shape the Research Library of the future (https://www.grl2020.net/). Next meeting of this working group is in February in Taiwan. I attach the position paper, which I submitted for this workshop.
This position paper was also presented at the Rome ShareFair . I posted about this sharefair at https://www.johanneskeizer.com/?q=node/738.
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.
At the beginning of December I conducted together with my colleague Peter Ballantyne, the IAALD president an evaluation of the ILRI InfoCenter . ILRI wanted an external and indipendent evaluation of the developments that had taken place in the restructuring of the ILRI library in the last years.
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
On invitation of Dr. Wang Zhong from the polytechnical University of Guangzhou I gave today a presentation with the title "The global knowledge society in the age of the Internet". More than 30 graduate and postgraduate students participates. A PDF Version of the presentation is attached. The .odp version is at https://www.johanneskeizer.com/files/GZ-University_jk_2008-08-01.odp.
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.
My group is collaborating with ICRISAT and the Indian Institute of Technology in the AGROPEDIA Indica project. My colleague Margherita Sini and I were invited to participate in the "Rice Workshop" of the project. I gave a keynote in the opening session which is attached,
Program Committee of a Workshop on Learning Technology Standards for Agriculture and Rural Development, which is scheduled to take place on 19 September 2008 in the context of the 4th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Bio and Earth Sciences (HAICTA 2008, https://infolab.aua.gr/haicta/conf/).
I am participating today in a meeting of the stakeholders in the Initiative for International Information Systems in Agricultural Science and Technology.
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-
From October 16-17 my group co-organized and hostend the DSpace Usergroup meeting 2007. (https://www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=11) My colleague Imma Subirats was one of the pillars of the entire organization. I got quite excited about DSpace and the possibilities to adapt it to Agricultural Open Archives.
I was also intrigued by the connections between DSpace and the MIT Simile project that brings a "semantic dimension" into the DSpace development. https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1660131278&size=m