I want to share the following conference announcement from Brian Kahin of the University of Michigan describing a very relevant and exciting event to be held in Washington DC January 29-30, 2007. This conference builds on themes presented at an earlier conference held at the National Academies which I believe a number of CNI-announce subscribers were able to attend.

Full details are available through the links in Brian's message.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

On January 29-30, 2007, the Committee for Economic Development, the Council on Competitiveness, the National Science Foundation, Science Commons, and the University of Michigan will hold a conference on "Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation" at the National Academies Building in Washington. This conference, the fourth in a series on the economic implications of advancing digital technology and infrastructure, builds on core problems and issues examined two years earlier in "Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy" ( http://advancingknowledge.com; http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11009 ).

Investments in cyberinfrastructure, like early investments in the Internet, will pay off not only in research and education but in the development of new products and services. Yet as knowledge-enabling infrastructure becomes more powerful and extensive, its users interact with traditional rules and practices for controlling and deriving value from knowledge. Patents, licensing, contracts, and other mechanisms and institutions have also become more potent, pervasive, diversified, and complex. Some fear that these controls may favor older, more familiar models of innovation such as solitary invention, R&D pipelines, and discrete product technologies – perhaps to the detriment of new cyberinfrastructure-empowered models that are more collaborative, cumulative, or distributed in nature. However, “private ordering” mechanisms, such as patent pools, data commons, open standards, and a variety of private and public licensing models, have arisen as ad hoc infrastructure to support new forms of innovation and common interest in the development of new knowledge and new markets. How well do these emergent mechanisms and institutions work? How well do they succeed in mitigating tensions and conflicts among different practices and policies? To what extent can or should they be incorporated into the broader knowledge-driven vision and design of cyberinfrastructure?

For further information, see http://cyberinfrastructure.us (updated regularly).