[Ecommerce] iCommons » Blog Let’s discuss “““cybe rinfrastructure“““

[Manon Ress]

--
[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
http://icommons.org/2007/02/05/let%e2%80%99s-discuss-%e2%80%9c%e2%80%
9c%e2%80%9ccyberinfrastructure%e2%80%9c%e2%80%9c%e2%80%9c/

Let’s discuss “““cyberinfrastructure“““

Rotunda at the National Academy of Science, by tvol, CC BY-NC-SA
2.0Participants at the Science Commons-sponsored Designing
Cyberinfrastructure conference offered so many different definitions
for the word that speakers - only half jokingly suggested that a
single set of quotation marks around the word wasn’t enough. And at
the end of the two-day event, those intentional quotation marks were
still being added.

Entitled “Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and
Innovation” (DCCI), this conference brought together over 200
participants from across the world – with government personalities
commingling with open source advocates, academics, patent experts,
and those in the sciences. The jam-packed program included panels
ranging from defining “cyberinfrastructure”, designing the virtual
organization, patent pooling, standards development and discussing
the ecology of “open” (another word that accumulated quote marks - as
did “commons”).

Science Commons co-sponsored the event with The U.S. National Science
Foundation (NSF), the University of Michigan’s School of Information,
the Council on Competitiveness, and the Council on Economic Development.

In attendance were members of the House Science Committee Congressmen
David Wu (D-Oregon) and Jim Turner (D-Texas), as well as
representatives from NSF, National Institute of Health (NIH), IBM,
Red Hat, the UK Patent Office, the Library of Congress, the
Federation of American Scientists, the U.S. National Institutes of
Health and many more. For a glimpse at the speaker list, click here.

The event was a success, opening the lines of discussion about a very
important yet multi-faceted concept that some struggle to define.
“Cyberinfrastructure” is said to offer the vision necessary that
integrates diverse resources across barriers based on time, location
and jurisdictions. These “diverse resources” consist of
supercomputers, mass storage, networking, databases and digital
libraries, software, education, training etc. The “barriers” aspect
can be physical, geographical, financially based, an issue of
sustainable models and so on. No wonder there were so many quotation
marks added.

But, with that said, cyberinfrastructure – in any of these working
definitions – was seen by many at the conference to hold the key to
moving forward in the digital age as technology evolves and the need
grows for an integrated system. This was evident not only in
conversations among personalities at the event but from the
presentations themselves, a common curiosity and belief in this model
to some degree.

For more information about the conference, please visit the
conference website.

Photograph: Rotunda at the National Academy of Science, by tvol, CC
BY-NC-SA 2.0




************************************************************************
***
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA
Tel.:  +1.202.332.2670, Ext 16 Fax: +1.202.332.2673

Consumer Project on Technology
1 Route des  Morillons, CP 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 791 6727

Consumer Project on Technology
24 Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RX, UK
Tel: +44(0)207 226 6663 ex 252 Fax: +44(0)207 354 0607