Reputation Economies Symposium

Reputation, which plays a key role in almost any economic or social system, is a fundamental aspect of any cyber-community that s not yet well understood. Because traditional modes of accreditation and prior acquaintance with participants usually do not apply to online communities, in recent years we have witnessed the development of alternative models for reputation management including ratings, stars, points, karma and others. These new models, which apply to people, goods, and services, challenge our accepted notions of identity, social capital, accreditation, expertise, and risk as they shift the reliance of reputation systems away from traditional social networks, educational backgrounds and institutional affiliations and towards the wisdom of the crowd. This shift, in turn, entails dramatic changes to information privacy, quality, ownership and the ability of groups and individuals to affect them. The symposium will seek to explore these themes, and their meaning to democracy. The symposium will bring together leading scholars from industry, academia and government to discuss the role of reputation in cyberspace and beyond.

More details coming soon...

Access to Knowledge Initiative (A2K)

History shows that revolutions come with a price tag and the “information revolution” through which we are living is no exception. We are only now beginning to understand the economic and humanitarian tolls along the information superhighway and how much the evolution into a worldwide information economy is really costing humanity on a global scale. Environmentalism was a belated response to the industrial revolution. The ISP Access to Knowledge (A2K) Initiative aims to build an intellectual framework that will protect access to knowledge both as a the basis for sustainable human development and to safeguard human rights.

Learn more about the A2K initiative
Visit the A2K2 2007 conference pages (April 27th-29th 2007)
Contribute to the A2K conference wiki

Open Standards International Symposium

This conference, the first to address global open standards issues from an academic perspective, has three objectives:

• Shed light on the controversial and value-laden concepts of openness, interoperability, democratic participation, and competitiveness in the context of standards.
• Afford an opportunity for political and economic stakeholders to find common ground on open standards.
• Begin to craft a theoretical framework exploring the concepts of open standards in the larger context of technology, markets, politics, and law.

Learn more...