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.

I gave a keynote presentation on the Deal Project at this conference (). It was the only presentation regarding Digital Ecosystems in Developing countries. Gerald Santucci, the unit head from the European commission, was very interested in further collaboration with us in interational projects.

I never heard about "stigmergies" before, but it is an interesting conceps that treats the fact that by exploiting the effects of mass collaboration, qualitative leaps can happen. An exemple are the constructions of termites, but an exemple is also Wikipedia. I would like to apply this to the transition from tag development to Ontologies. If 1000 of taggers refer to themselves also her a " stigmergy" effect should happen (Francis Heylighen from FreeUniversity of Brussels is the researcher in this area)