I’ll be attending this:

World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures:
London 2005

When: Saturday 1st & Sunday 2nd of October
Programme: see the “programme page”:http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/programme.html
Where: Limehouse Town Hall, 646 Commercial Road, London, E14 7HA (Map)
Registration: http://www.wsfii.org/register.php
Wiki: http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/wiki
Mailing lists: Join the announce list and/or the discussion list

On the first weekend of October (1st and 2nd) the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures is taking place in London. This event will bring together individuals and groups from across the world working on projects such as free wireless networking, free of copyright mapping and open hardware. It is also part of a larger season of events based around alternative approaches to knowledge production and access and timed to coincide with the UK’s hosting of a pan-European Creative Economy conference.

The event is open to all but we encourage you to register because space is limited. A small entrance fee of £10 is planned to help pay for costs but concessions are available.

Increasing volumes of information are fueling a need for new ways to interact with data. Keyboards, mice and computer screens have served us well so far but they come from a time when we manipulated information personally. Today we have so much to work with that just cant do it all on our own anymore. So we have started building tools to do it for us. Rss feeds, podcasting, del.icio.us are all tools we’ve built to help us agregate information but these a designed to address the problem of finding information. What about displaying information?

Imagine you are a gardener. You grow your own network garden where each plant, which you have already selected and planted, grows up fed by your communication data.

!http://jee.manme.org.uk/img/garden.jpg!

“GORI”:http://jee.manme.org.uk/ars2005.php means ‘an open hook’ in Korean and it is often used to represent human relationships. Here it is used to express the image of ‘fastening or loosening the relationship at your will’

The project intends to explore the relation between an individual and his or her everyday social experience in the network and represent it by using metaphors of nature.

Pretty cool huh? More conceptual than practical Philips, however, has also announced a really “impressive bit of technology”:http://www.polymervision.com/New-Center/Press-Releases/Article-14693.html:

!http://www.geekzone.co.nz/images/news/readius.jpg!

The Readius is the world’s first prototype of a functional electronic-document reader that can unroll its display to a scale larger than the device itself.

Now thats straight off the pages of scifi novels. In fact I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553380966/103-3514303-4171801?v=glance at the moment which revolves around a book that works a lot like the Readius (it’s more advanced though). The book generates content tailored to Nell, the little girl who finds the book, printing it in plain text or animating it thanks tothe stolen technology that was used to create it’s pages.

These interfaces are slowly becoming a reality…