World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf, widely known as a "father of the Internet" and Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, were among the more than 60 speakers leading more than 20 different events at the three-day FutureWeb conference in Raleigh, N.C., April 28-30. The event was organized by the Imagining the Internet Center of Elon's School of Communications, and involved more than 40 Elon students, faculty and staff.
FutureWeb was collocated with the 19th International World Wide Web Conference, being held in the United States for the first time since 2004.
Leaders from Google, NTIA, Microsoft, IBM, EPIC, Mozilla, eBay, the Internet Society, Red Hat, Lulu and discussed what the evolution of the Web might mean for our social, political and economic future.
In addition to Berners-Lee and Cerf, speakers included US government technology policy leaders Andrew McLauglin and Danny Weitzner, social media researcher danah boyd, privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg, Pew Internet Project director Lee Rainie, Red Hat and Lulu co-founder Bob Young, eBay vice president Bob Page, open-source expert Michael Tiemann, Google’s Chris DiBona and Phil Mui, and Doc Searls, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto.” Rainie led informative one-on-one interview sessions with key speakers about the likely future of the Web.
Elon students, faculty and staff from the School of Communications provided comprehensive coverage of the conference, including stories on each session, video highlights, blog postings and Twitter updates. See their work via the Imagining the Internet site, FutureWeb2010 site, and Twitter.
FutureWeb session topics included the following:
- Privacy, a panel discussion led by Rotenberg (EPIC)
- Intellectual property, organized by Dave Levine (Stanford CIS and Elon Law)
- Social networks, organized by Fred Stutzman (ClaimID)
- Entrepreneurship, organized by Tom Miller (NC State Entrepreneurship Initiative)
- Open Source, featuring Tiemann (Red Hat), and DiBona (Google)
- Core Values of the Internet, featuring Berners-Lee and Weitzner
- Media, organized by Paul Jones (ibiblio), featuring Searls, Dan Conover (Xark), Michael Clemente (Fox News)
- Web analytics, featuring the top analytics professionals from Google and eBay
- Education, organized by Cathy Davidson (MacArthur Digital Media & Learning)
- Interactive Design, organized by David Burney (New Kind)
FutureWeb also included a high school Social Media Future Academy. More information is available at: http://futureweb2010.wordpress.com/for-students-2/
FutureWeb was one of three collocated conferences with WWW2010 (www2010.org), an annual international conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. It began in 1994 at CERN and is organized by the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2). The WWW Conference aims to provide a forum for discussion and debate about the evolution of the Web, the standardization of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. The conference brings together researchers, developers, users and commercial ventures. WWW2010 focused on “openness” in web technologies, standards and practices, and showcased the best of the region’s technology and culture.
