The striking architecture of the Government Conference Center

The building used to be Ottawa's train station, situated close to Parliament and on the banks of the Rideau Canal. 

A question from the floor during the participative web conference. 

Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa

Chair William New, Editor-in-Chief of Intellectual Property Watch

Chair David Crane, senior Canadian journalist

Paul Misener, Amazon.com’s Vice President for Global Public Policy.

Chair John Lettice, Editorial Director of The Register

Ginsu Yoon, Vice President, Business Affairs for Linden Lab

Michael Gill, Chief Executive Officer, Fairfax Business Media

Suzanne Huttner, Director of the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Directorate. During the first session.

Michael Binder: Assistant Deputy Minister of Spectrum, Information Technologies and Telecommunications, in Industry Canada. Taken during the opening session.

Michael Binder and Suzanne Huttner, Director of the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Directorate

Above: Ginsu Yoon talking about Second Life

Andrew Herbert (at podium, left) of Microsoft Research Cambridge, presenting in the "Research 2.0" stream

Diana Rhoten (at podium, left) of US NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure, presenting in "Research 2.0" stream

Mozelle Thompson (on the left) presenting about privacy, including Facebook privacy (Mozelle was standing in for Chris Kelly of Facebook, who was unable to attend).

Michael Geist (at podium, right) chairing the concluding policy roundtable at the end of the forum 

There was an enormous amount of information and debate during the ten sessions at the conference yesterday. Despite our best efforts as bloggers, we were only able to cover a few threads. So, in an attempt to provide a more overarching and objective summary of the day's events, several of the OECD staff have put together a few points to act as an unofficial review. A more formal and official document will be prepared and supplied to the OECD members, but this should serve as a useful, quick overview of the day.

Full transcripts of every session can be found here. 

Programme

Session 1: THE FUTURE OF THE PARTICIPATIVE WEB: CONVERGENCE AND DIVERSITY
Sessions 2: CREATIVITY AND THE INTERNET ECONOMY: BUSINESS AND SCIENCE
Sessions 3: CREATIVITY AND THE INTERNET ECONOMY: USERS, GOVERNMENTS AND CITIZENS
Sessions 4: CONFIDENCE AND COMPETITION IN THE INTERNET ECONOMY:  OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF THE PARTICIPATIVE WEB
Sessions 5: POLICY ROUNDTABLE: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR POLICY

• Profound changes are under way and yet to come in the economy and society, brought about by the participative web.
• Not just business impacts
• Reinventing government, politics and civic life
• Challenge how to balance the needs to govern efficiently and effectively and fairly against the opportunities this set of technologies present and how quickly and unpredictably they change
• Difficult to assume what the market place and impacts will be and what policy should look like
  

• Access to high speed networks (including wireless) and closing broadband gap, addressing new digital divides
• Role for government investment in infrastructure?
• Improve access to research and access to education and public information
• Fostering new types of media literacy
  

• Intellectual property issues
• New ways of rewarding creators (ISPs collecting blanket fee?)
• Questions around safe harbours and liability of intermediaries
• Network neutrality concerns 
• Competition policy and network effects: monopolistic (?) role of access to content 
• Interoperability and standards 
• Digital identity, Privacy, and Control
• Intersection between the local physical reality and legal frameworks, and the global differences in cultures and laws
• Government role: Way in which government engages with the new participative citizen. Are governments ready? (Are citizens ready?)
  

Ottawa Citizen - October 4, 2007 - Officials grapple with ever-evolving Internet

Top executives and government officials from around the world met in Ottawa yesterday to grapple with the issues of an ever-growing, ever-shifting Internet.

From online piracy to questions of how to divide the advertising revenue bonanza, the bureaucrats and representatives of such Internet heavyweights as Amazon.com, MySpace, Facebook, Second Life and Google talked strategy -- even as they admitted that control of the Internet is constantly becoming more diffuse. "A lot has changed over the past 10 years," said Michael Binder, assistant deputy minister of spectrum, information technologies and telecommunications at Industry Canada. "People are now not only using the Internet more, but contributing to its development."