Accelerating Change 2004 Debates

Our three AC2004 debates are fun, passionate, and relevant discussions of key issues in each of our three conference themes. Speakers are chosen to be captivating speakers, and have compelling yet importantly opposing ideas on issues related to the debate topic. Our skillful moderators will keep them from getting too personal in their exchanges... we hope.

1. Physical Space Debate

David Brin vs. Brad Templeton, moderated by Steve Jurvetson, on:
"The Costs and Benefits of Transparency: How Far, How Fast, How Fair?"

(Saturday, Nov 6, 2:30pm)
Summary: David Brin is a Physicist, a Science Fiction Writer, and the Author of The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, 1999, a book that proposes we can have increasing social transparency without being forced to choose between freedom and security. As a scientist, Brin was a fellow at the California Space Institute. More recently, he has been a research affiliate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and participated in interdisciplinary activities at the UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. Brin notes our society's knee-jerk tendency to either fear the future or blindly accept the status quo, and argues today's complex world demands a third response: increasing transparency, acknowledgement of our long term, complex problems, honesty with our shortcomings, and confidence that we can make measurable annual progress toward solutions. For more information visit www.DavidBrin.com Brad Templeton is the Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He asks: can all-pervasive surveillance be avoided? What are the dangers if we don't avoid it? What are the things that always go wrong? How closely tied are privacy and freedom? Can we watch the watchers without them watching us? Templeton founded and ran ClariNet Communications Corp., the first internet-based content company, then sold it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. Author of a dozen microcomputer software projects, he has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the most widely read computerized conference on that network. Brad is chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights advocacy group for cyberspace. He also sits on the advisory boards for a few internet startups. Currently he is building a new startup to reinvent the phone call. For more information visit www.Templetons.com. Moderator Steve Jurvetson is one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capitalists and innovation experts. He is a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. For more information visit www.dfj.com.

In Detail: See David's provocative cover story ("Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society!"; registration required) in August's Salon on transparency, the rapid growth of digital recording and communication in our society, both public and private. Brad has written popular pieces about property and privacy rights (see "Ten Big Myths About Copyright" and his take on privacy issues in Google's GMail).

One of David's big issues is our culture and media's knee-jerk tendency to either 1) fear the future or 2) blindly accept the status quo, when today's complex world demands instead 3) a radical new openness, honesty with our shortcomings, self-examination of our unsolved problems, and confidence that we can make measurable annual progress in fixing them. A quote for your file:

"There's a world to be saved and those who spread either complacency or gloom aren't helping. What we need is confidence and a sense that our efforts can matter. That will come, if we open our eyes to how much good has already been done. Are we ready, at last, to stop ridiculing those eager, can-do boys and girls who believe in progress?" — David Brin

David proposes that we can have increasing transparency without being forced to choose between freedom and security (e.g., more of one means less of the other).

Brad also wants to avoid this forced tradeoff, but doesn't see increasing transparency as the answer and is much less optimistic that we are managing these issues well. Among the questions he will ask: Can all-pervasive surveillance be avoided? What are the dangers if we don't avoid it? What are the things that always go wrong? How closely tied are privacy and freedom? Can we watch the watchers without them watching us?

Come join us and add your voice to this important debate in the Q&A.

David Brin, Ph.D. has a triple career as scientist, public speaker, and author. His fifteen novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman. Another novel, Startide Rising, is in pre-production at Paramount Pictures. Brin's widely acclaimed 1998 non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with a wide range of threats and opportunities facing our wired society during the information age.

As a scientist, Brin was a fellow at the California Space Institute. More recently, he has been a research affiliate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and participated in interdisciplinary activities at the UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. He now lives in San Diego County with his wife, two infants, and about a hundred very demanding trees.

Brad Templeton founded and ran ClariNet Communications Corp., the first internet-based content company, then sold it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. ClariNet publishes an online electronic newspaper delivered for live reading on subscribers machines. He has been active in the computer network community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the world's most widely read computerized conference on that network. He has been a software company founder, and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products.

Brad is chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights advocacy group for cyberspace. He also sits on the advisory boards for a few internet startups. Currently he is building a new startup to reinvent the phone call. He is also on the board of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech think-tank.

Debate moderator Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Previously, Mr. Jurvetson was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard. His prior technical experience also includes programming, materials science research (TEM atomic imaging of GaAs), and computer design at HP's PC Division, the Center for Materials Research, and Mostek. He has also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT Software. As a Consultant with Bain & Company, Mr. Jurvetson developed executive marketing, sales, engineering and business strategies for a wide range of companies in the software, networking and semiconductor industries. At Stanford University, he finished his BSEE in 2.5 years and graduated #1 in his class, as the Henry Ford Scholar. Mr. Jurvetson also holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. He received his MBA from the Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Mr. Jurvetson also serves on the Merrill Lynch and STVP Advisory Boards and is Co-Chair of the NanoBusiness Alliance. He was recently honored as "The Valley's Sharpest VC" on the cover of Business 2.0 and chosen by the SF Chronicle and SF Examiner as one of "the ten people expected to have the greatest impact on the Bay Area in the early part of the 21st Century." He was profiled in the New York Times Magazine and featured on the cover of Worth and Fortune Magazines. Steve was chosen by Forbes as one of "Tech's Best Venture Investors", by the VC Journal as one of the "Ten Most Influential VCs", and by Fortune as part of their "Brain Trust of Top Ten Minds."

Steve has a thought-provoking new blog, the J curve, that we suggest browsing. Check out Brad's ideas blog if you are a tinkerer and like redesigning things. Finally, David's home page (http://davidbrin.com) is a very important read as well.

2. Virtual Space Debate

Jamie Hale, Steve Salyer, Brian Green and Daniel James,
moderated by Cory Ondrejka, on:
“Real Money in Virtual Economies: The Future of User-Created Content”

(Sunday, Nov 7, 9:30am)
Summary: Virtual worlds are becoming real world economic systems as their currencies are exchangeable through secondary market sellers like IGE and Gaming Open Market. Some innovative persistent worlds, like Linden Lab's Second Life, give users copyright over the content they create. Some gamers today make substantial incomes offering virtual services (eg., avatar creation) and virtual goods. For most people, virtual economies are one of the "biggest things you've never heard of." Where is the virtual economy going? Jamie Hale is president of Gaming Open Market Corp., a Canadian company that has built the world's first foreign exchange website for massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) currencies. Jamie has a degree in computer science and software engineering from the University of Toronto. He is studying for his Canadian Securities Course. For more information visit www.gamingopenmarket.com. Steve Salyer is President of Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) a leading services provider to the MMOG community. He has twenty five years of senior management experience at entertainment technology companies including Ubisoft, the Learning Company, and Electronic Arts. For more information visit www.ige.com. Brian Green is a Co-Founder of Near Death Studios. Brian has been an avid gamer for years, and has gaining degrees in both Computer Science and Spanish Literature. He worked on Meridian 59 where he helped design and program three updates to the game, then worked on a single player game at 3DO. He currently does programming, design, and writing for innovative online games at Near Death Studios. For more visit www.neardeathstudios.com. Daniel James is the CEO of Three Rings and the Lead Designer of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. Three Rings is an independent developer of online games based in San Francisco. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is a skill-based persistent world based on casual puzzle games. For more visit www.threerings.net. Moderator Cory Ondrejka is Vice President of Product Development at Linden Lab, creators of one most rapidly growing online persistent worlds, Second Life. For more visit www.lindenlab.com and www.secondlife.com

In Detail: This debate will clue attendees in to one of the biggest new emergences that most of us haven't yet heard of: virtual property markets and their intellectual property issues. The interchange may produce a few new business plans and should also be a whole lot of fun. Participants will make legal, dollar, behavioral, and design forecasts for the virtual property markets within massively multi-player games, debating the practice from seller and designer viewpoints, and business vs. gaming intentions.

Some background: Listen to Bill Gurley's massively multi-player market talk from O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference for one recent overview. In late 2001, economist Edward Castronova published a landmark paper entitled “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market Society on the Cyberian Frontier” describing how new trading markets for virtual items produced within the massively multi-user virtual world of EverQuest were translating into real dollars, on auction sites (such as eBay, at the time). Castronova’s paper became the most downloaded paper on the Social Science Research Network.

Since then, such worlds have become increasingly popular, complex, and connected to a number of real world economic systems, including secondary market sellers like IGE and Gaming Open Market. Some gamers today are making a living offering virtual services (eg., avatar creation), goods (producing or trading goods) and currency market development and arbitrage. There is now an annual conference at New York Law School dedicated to sorting out the legal implications of these new physical-virtual relationships (State of Play). Dr. Castronova now has a tenured professorship at Indiana University where he will be focusing on virtual worlds studies.

Jamie Hale is president of Gaming Open Market, a Canadian company that has built the world's first foreign exchange website for MMOG currencies. Jamie has a degree in computer science and software engineering from the University of Toronto, and maintains a healthy if somewhat dusty library of economics and finance textbooks. He is studying for his Canadian Securities Course.

Steve Salyer is President of Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), the world’s largest secondary market for goods and currencies from massively multi-player games and virtual worlds. He has over twenty five years of experience in senior management roles in companies providing technology-based entertainment products. Prior to joining IGE, he was president of business development for Ubisoft. Steve has produced music, television, and interactive products and is an avid online gamer.

Brian Green is Co-Founder of Near Death Studios. Brian has been an avid gamer for years, beginning with an addiction to a text MUD in college. After gaining degrees in both Computer Science and Spanish Literature, he got a job that would have made Dilbert cringe. After he recognized a passion for online games that never went away, he had the privilege of working on Meridian 59 where he helped design and program three updates to the game before he worked on a single player game at 3DO. Afterwards, he worked a short time at Communities.com. He currently does programming, design, and writing for innovative online games with the other co-founders at Near Death Studios.

Daniel James is CEO of Three Rings, an independent developer of online games based in San Francisco, and Lead Designer of Three Rings' first game, Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, a skill-based persistent world based on casual puzzle games. Prior to founding Three Rings, Daniel consulted on online games design, endeavoured to create Middle-earth Online, and founded two successful start-ups. He has been playing and building online games since 1983.

Debate moderator Cory Ondrejka is VP of Product development at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life—a unique massively multi-user online world built and owned by its users. He has an extensive background in software development and project management. Cory will also deliver a keynote presentation in the Virtual Space theme at AC2004, entitled, "Living the Dream: Business, Community and Innovation at the Dawn of Digital Worlds."

3. Interface Debate

Jaron Lanier vs. Will Wright, moderated by Mark Finnern, on:
"Finding Humanity in the Interface: Capacity Atrophy or Augmentation?"

(Sunday, Nov 7, 4:30pm)
Summary: As our interfaces get continually smarter, how do we keep them from dehumanizing us? Should we be concerned that U.S. youth have had forty years of declining math, science, and analytical reading skills? Do we need 1960's math skills in a world with ubiquitous calculators, or reading skills in a world with digital cable? Or thinking skills in a world with intelligent text analytics? Jaron Lanier is the Founder of VPL Research and Advisor to the National Tele-Immersion Initiative; he is also a Computer Scientist, Composer and Artist. Lanier notes: Computer people are sounding a lot like religious people these days. Meanwhile, old time religious people seem to distrust the scientific program more and more. Would stem cell research have been restricted if it had come up twenty years ago? Religion has a way of sneaking up on you, and so do religious wars. It takes two to fight a war, and digital culture still has time to shut this war down. All that we need is a little humility, honesty, and the very hard work of designing computers for the sake of people instead of the easier work of designing computers for the sake of computers. For more information visit www.advanced.org/jaron/. Will Wright is a Co-Founder of Maxis; and Creator of Sim City. Wright's social simulation game, The Sims, has become the best-selling PC game of all time. In 1999 he was included in Entertainment Weekly’s "It List" of "the 100 most creative people in entertainment" as well as Time Digital’s "Digital 50", a listing of "the most important people shaping technology today." For more information visit www.maxis.com and www.ea.com. Moderator Mark Finnern manages the Collaboration Area of the fastest growing SAP Community: The SAP Developer Network. Mark is also the founder and host of the Bay Area Future Salon, co-producer of the Accelerating Change 2004 conference, and blogger for the O'Reilly Network. For more information visit www.futuresalon.org.

In Detail: As our interfaces get continually smarter, how do we keep them from dehumanizing us? Can we avoid the world of MT Anderson's masterful dystopia, Feed (2002), where the internet-jacked, childlike teens of 2030 speak pidgin English and live primarily as vehicles for highly sophisticated and automated corporate marketing and political programming?

Should we be concerned that U.S. youth have had forty years of declining math, science, and analytical reading skills? Do we need 1960's math skills in a world with ubiquitous calculators, or reading skills in a world with digital cable? Or thinking skills in a world with intelligent text analytics?

Encouragingly, the Millennial generation reaches maturity earlier, communicates in new nonlinear ways, and has a strong facility to adapt to new technology. But are we in danger of losing our perspective, independence, and global vision? What are our most important priorities as we enter a world of increasingly sophisticated interfaces and simulations?

Join us as interface legends Jaron Lanier and Will Wright discuss and debate this and related topics in a fun, heated, and fascinating exchange. As Jaron says, "All that we need is a little humility, honesty, and the very hard work of designing computers for the sake of people instead of the easy fantasy work of designing computers for the sake of computers."

Jaron Lanier is well known among developers as the co-inventor of "virtual reality," a term he coined in the 1980s as founder and former CEO of VPL Research. In the late 1980s he lead the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays as well as the first "avatars." While at VPL, he co-developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas. He lead the team that developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications.

As a musician, Lanier has been active in the world of new "classical" music since the late seventies. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia. Renowned as a composer, musician, computer scientist, and artist, he has taught at many university computer science departments around the country, including Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. He recently served as the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative. In 1993, he predicted that virtual reality would be accessible to consumers by 2010. He still thinks that's true.

Will Wright is Chief Designer and Co-Founder of Maxis (sold to Electronic Arts for $125M in 1997). He released his first game SimCity: The City Simulator in 1989, an instant hit which has won 24 domestic and international awards. Sim City brought complex, realistic simulations to desktop PCs, a capability previously only available to military, scientists and academicians. Using an easy graphical interface, Sim City opened the world of simulations to consumers. SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and SimCity 4 Deluxe have continued the tradition. SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCopter have explored other facets of the natural and technological world.

His social simulation game, The Sims, was released in February of 2000. With over 9 million copies worldwide, 7 expansion packs, and numerous "Game of The Year" accolades, The Sims has become the best-selling PC game of all time. The Sims Online and The Sims 2 (released September 2004, to critical acclaim) are moving The Sims toward an increasingly realistic world where you choose your role, attitude and destiny. He is now working on a "third generation" simulation project at Maxis.

Wright has become one of the most successful designers of interactive entertainment in the world. In 1999 he was included in Entertainment Weekly’s "It List" of "the 100 most creative people in entertainment" as well as Time Digital’s "Digital 50", listing of "the most important people shaping technology today." As one of his hobbies, Wright (along with his daughter) takes part in the annual Battlebot competition broadcast nationally on Comedy Central.

Debate moderator Mark Finnern manages the Collaboration Area of the fastest growing SAP Community: The SAP Developer Network. Mark is also the founder and host of the Bay Area Future Salon, co-producer of the Accelerating Change 2004 conference, and blogger for the O'Reilly Network. An amateur musician and community builder, he is interested in how we may best use technology to improve personal insight and strengthen civic life.

Accelerating Change 2004 Panel Presentations

Our six panels highlight the views of leading thinkers on strategic topics relevant to conference themes.

1. Pervasive Computing Panel: Challenges of Persistent Distributed IT
Dana Blankenhorn (writer and consultant), Joachim Schaper (SAP Research Labs) and Andreas Olligschlaeger (TruNorth Data Systems).

Dana Blankenhorn is a Technology Business Journalist, Consultant, and Author of The Blankenhorn Effect: How to Put Moore's Law to Work for You, 2002. The title of his presentation is The World of 'Always On'. He shares his perspective on what it will take to get us to a world of 24/7 connectivity, pervasive broadband and wireless, and secure and scalable standards that will enable the next level of social opportunity and business productivity. For more information visit www.corante.com/mooreslore/. Joachim Schaper is the Vice President Americas at SAP Research Labs. His presentation is titled Smart Items in the Enterprise. SAP Labs is using smart technologies to provide a holistic service-oriented architecture for the seamless integration of real-world data and events with enterprise software. Schaper discusses how this approach exploits the capabilities of current, emerging and future ubiquitous pervasive computing technologies, used reliably to assist enterprise-level decision making. Distributing business logic to the periphery of the network, with logic on the item, enables new and improved business processes at the 'point-of-action', improving enterprise system response time and scalability. Many companies are beginning to use these new tools to provide high-value services that can be enabled and distributed through an enterprise service architecture. For more information visit www.SAP.com. Andreas Olligschlaeger is the President of TruNorth Data Systems. The title of his talk is Advanced IT and Security Systems in Law Enforcement. Olligschaeger notes that the use of information technology in law enforcement has traditionally lagged behind private industry and increasingly even consumers. This talk focuses on the current state of the art in law enforcement technology as well as new technologies in development. Central to the successful adoption and use of new technologies in pervasive computing, data mining, forecasting, and other areas is the resolution of privacy concerns by the general public. Olligschlaeger was formerly Systems Scientist at the Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He has over 18 years experience working with advanced database systems and GIS, and is internationally recognized for his pioneering efforts in designing, developing and implementing state-of-art law enforcement information systems. He was the first person to automate geocoding of video, using speech recognition and entity extraction techniques. Dr. Olligschlaeger has worked with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. For more information visit www.trunorthsystems.com.

2. Innovation Managers Panel: I.T., Nanotech, and Venture Capital
Cynthia Breazeale (Intel), Steve Jurvetson (DFJ) and Christine Peterson (Foresight Institute).

Cynthia Breazeale (unrelated to Cynthia Breazeal of MIT) is an IT Innovation Strategic Program Manager at Intel. The title of her talk is Innovation Through IT: Enabling Systemic Innovation. Here Breazeale shares the key learning, strategies, and a few of the industry-transforming results of the Intel IT Innovation organization. The Intel IT division chartered a small organization to work outside of the traditional roles and responsibilities and empowered them to discover new business value through innovation. The result was surprisingly immediate – and dramatic. Intellectual property capture rates within IT increased over 600% the first year. Emerging technology prototypes were merged with industry solutions causing adoption at government levels to soar. A new business practice was developed that provides IT managers with a means to project measurable business value return from information technology investments. The road to these successes, however, was not obvious. For more information visit www.Intel.com/research/. Steve Jurvetson is the Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. One of Silicon Valley's leading lights in innovation funding, Jurvetson discusses DFJ's general approach to the challenge of funding for technology and business innovation. The title of his talk is Discovering a Renaissance in Innovation. He notes that collectively, we are going to be learning more in next 20 years than in the last 100 years. But there is a glacial change of human nature compared to technological change. DFJ's international affiliates are partners in a global innovation watch, maximizing the ability to discover the next disruptive technologies while they are in their earliest and most underfunded stages. Such perspectives may be helpful to designing and managing your own innovation pipeline in a world of increasingly global expertise. For more information visit www.dfj.com. Christine Peterson is a Co-Founder and Vice President of the Foresight Institute and Co-Author, Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work, 1997. The title of her talk is Championing Innovation in Nanotechnology: Lessons Learned. She sees her task at Foresight as helping to maximize progress toward and minimize potential problems coming from humanity's ever-increasing control of the structure of matter, down to the level of individual atoms. One of the most powerful developments we expect in coming years will be new classes of molecular machine systems -- artificial structures inspired by those found widely in nature. Vigorous debate, policy formulation, and public education on this controversial topic has been in progress since the late 1970s, and organized since 1986. Major progress has been achieved, but challenges remain. Foresight has been responsibly championing innovation in nanotech research and policy debate for many years. Foresight has concluded that open, cooperative international development, including of defensive technologies, combined with stable, trustworthy institutions is the best path forward. As the National Nanotechnology Initiative and other efforts outside the U.S. take new steps toward Feynman's vision, we need calm, clear thinking about abstract, complex, and potentially scary topics. Peterson discusses lessons learned in this process, as each year takes us closer to a world of transformative molecular nanotechnology. For more information visit www.foresight.org.

3. Distance Infrastructure Panel: Broadband, Videoconferencing, and Telepresence
Milton Chen (VSee Lab), Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford University) and Dewayne Hendricks (Dandin).

Milton Chen is the Chief Technical Officer of VSee Lab. The title of his talk is Visual Communication and Collaboration Software for Afghanistan. Here he presents VSee, a videoconferencing platform designed for austere environments. VSee is unique in that it allows communication during emergency response when cell phone, telephone and the Internet are not available. VSee was selected as the real-time communication system for the recent Navy humanitarian exercise, Strong Angel. Lastly, he describes the deployment of VSee in Afghanistan. For more visit www.vseelab.com. Jeremy Bailenson is Director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab as well as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. The title of his presentation is Collaborative Virtual Environments and Transformed Social Interaction. Bailenson notes that over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written letters to telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and videoconferences. Similarly, online collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) promise to further change the nature of interaction. CVEs are systems which track verbal and nonverbal signals of multiple interactants and render those signals onto avatars, three-dimensional, digital representations of people in a shared digital space. Implications for communications systems, marketing strategies, and behavioral science research are briefly discussed. For more information visit www.stanford.edu/group/vhil/. Dewayne Hendricks is a Wireless Activist, CEO of Dandin Group and Director of the Wireless Task Force, GBOB Initiative. The title of his talk is One Gigabit or Bust™ Initiative - A Broadband Vision for California. Hendricks notes that it has been generally accepted that the United States has fallen behind other industrialized countries with regards to the adoption of broadband services. Recent estimates show penetration rates of only 35%, comparing poorly to countries such as South Korea, which has adoption rates exceeding 95%, with far greater average bandwidth rates delivered at much lower costs. Other countries, including Canada, have adopted national broadband initiatives to bring high speed broadband connectivity to all its citizens. The United States has no such initiative in place at the present time. The State of California has decided to move ahead with its own broadband initiative. His talk briefly outlines the goals and objectives of the GBOB initiative and report on its progress to date. For more information visit www.warpspeed.com.

4. Virtual Community and Education Panel: Living and Learning in Virtual Worlds
Nova Barlow (Themis Group), Robin Harper (Linden Lab). Moderator: Clark Aldrich

Nova Barlow is an Online Community Developer with the Themis Group. The title of her talk is The Art of Community Management. Barlow believes that community management is the critical success factor in determining whether an online game slips into oblivion or grows into a successful, long-lived service. Effective management directly impacts conversion, retention, and, through word of mouth, sales. Although many games have a "Community Manager", this presentation will touch upon how community management done right is really a team effort. She briefly provides an overview of internal and external methods in this area, as well as a few suggestions on what is needed to help create and maximize potential. For more information visit www.themis-group.com. Robin Harper is the Senior VP of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life. The title of her presentation is Real Learning in Digital Worlds. She asks: what does it mean to try to teach in a digital world? The simulation aspects of digital worlds are enticing. Instant focus groups, real-time collaboration in a physically realistic environment, the elimination of distance, and in a world like Second Life, the ability to work together creatively, all hold tremendous appeal for teachers and students alike. How are people taking advantage of these opportunities? What does it mean for the community in a digital world to have a class of sociology students roaming the landscape? Harper looks at the different ways people are experimenting with teaching and learning in today's digital worlds. She joined Linden Lab in 2002, bringing extensive experience in consumer marketing of innovative software. She responsible for all marketing activities, and more recently has added responsibility for community development and growth. She was formerly the Vice President of Marketing at Maxis, a division of Electronic Arts. For more information visit www.lindenlab.com and www.secondlife.com. Moderator Clark Aldrich is lead developer of SimuLearn's Virtual Leader, the first workforce learning simulation to follow the development cycle of a modern computer game. He recently authored Simulations and the Future of Learning, 2003. For more information, visit www.simulearn.net.

5. Natural Interface Panel: Text Analytics Apps and Talking Computers
Tim Sibley (StreamSage), Wlodek Zadrozny (IBM Research) and Rich Skrenta (Topix.net).

Tim Sibley is the Chief Scientist at StreamSage. The title of his presentation is Language Processing: Is the Acceleration Missing? Sibley notes that while advances in the field of computational linguistics certainly add to the accelerating pace of technological change within society, the field itself is riddled with exponentially hard problems, inefficient development structures and incentives, and disconnected efforts. In light of this, the field is in some ways far less a model of accelerating change. His talk makes assesses this situation, and provides general expectations of what new changes we may expect to see in the near future. For more, visit www.streamsage.com. Wlodek Zadrozny is a Technologist for On Demand Innovation Services at IBM Research. The title of his talk is Analytics for Asset Valuation: Tools for Evaluating Intangible Assets are Emerging and Will Change the Investment Landscape. Intangible assets, such as brand value, customer opinions or management quality, constitute 80% of stock market valuation. Moreover, as a percentage, the proportion of intangible assets is increasing. However, there are few tools for evaluating and comparing intangibles. Zadrozny notes that this situation is about to change: tools for evaluating intangible attributes of value are emerging; they use text analytics and data mining, and exploit information integration to bring together disparate data sources. The coming change could be sudden, because there is a core of a hundred or so attributes used to evaluate intangible assets, and the existing technologies are capable of adequately extracting their values. The promise: new tools and data repositories that will allow investors to review company performance with respect to the intangibles in the same way as spreadsheets and balance sheets currently do for the tangibles. For more visit domino.research.ibm.com/odis/odis.nsf. Rich Skrenta is Co-Founder and CEO of Topix.net. The title of his talk is Text Analytics for News. Skrenta provides an overview of automated text analytics tools that have allowed Topix to emerge as a customized aggregator for local news. In his last position, Rich held a variety of senior roles at Netscape/America Online, including Director of Engineering for Netscape Search, AOL Music, and AOL Shopping. Rich joined Netscape/AOL upon its purchase of NewHoo/The Open Directory Project, where he was Co-founder & CEO. Previously, Rich led an engineering group at Sun Microsystems, and ran a successful online gaming company from 1994-2001. Rich has a BA degree from Northwestern University. For more information visit www.topix.net.

6. Social Software Panel: Weblogs, Wikis and Digital Democracy
Lada Adamic (HP Labs), Peter Kaminski (SocialText) and Zack Rosen (CivicSpace).

Lada Adamic is a Research Scientist at HP Labs. Her presentation is titled Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace. Leveraging the electronic nature of blogs, email, and instant messaging, her group studies the flow of information and its underlying social networks on a large scale. Recently, her group has developed a new ranking algorithm, iRank, for blogs. Weblogs link together in a complex structure through which new ideas and discourse can flow. Such a structure is ideal for the study of the propagation of information. Adamic describes general categories of information epidemics and has created tools to infer and visualize the paths specific infections take through the network. This inference is based in part on a novel utilization of data describing historical, repeating patterns of infection. Lada Adamic has a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2001, and was previously a researcher at the Internet Ecologies group at Xerox PARC. For more information visit www.hpl.hp.com. Peter Kaminski is the Chief Technical Officer and a Co-Founder of Socialtext. The title of his talk is Enterprising Social Software: Wikis and Weblogs. Kaminski describes wikis and weblogs as lean, efficient tools born and bred on the web for working together as we share information. What can we learn from these tools and the way they're used as we adapt them for use within the enterprise? He discusses lessons learned in the course of developing and bringing the original enterprise wiki to market. Kaminski has more than 20 years of executive management and technology development experience, specializing in leading-edge applications of network and information technologies. For more information visit www.socialtext.com and www.peterkaminski.com. Zack Rosen is the Founder and Director of CivicSpace Labs and the Creator of DeanSpace social software. His talk is titled Empowering Democracy through Social Software. He expects that social software will help define the future of our political process and the world's power structure. He describes breakthroughs this past year in the United States and notes glimpses of a radical reshaping now occurring in South Korea. But what are the dynamics that are driving this insurgency? What will be the next breakthrough? What are the societal implications? His presentation discusses these questions and considers the future of U.S. democracy. For more information visit www.civicspacelabs.org.