Janna Quitney Anderson, associate professor in the School of Communications and director of the Imagining the Internet Center, has been named to the steering committee for the World Wide Web 2010 conference.
The event will feature keynote speakers Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf, and it will take place in Raleigh, N.C., April 26-30, 2010.
More information is available on the WWW2010 site: http://www2010.org/www/
The conference is a yearly international gathering of people who are working to determine 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 http://www.iw3c2.org/ ). The Conference aims to provide the world a premier 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 – those who are passionate about the Web and what it has to offer. WWW2010 will focus on “openness” in web technologies, standards and practices, and will showcase the best of the region’s technology and culture. The 2009 conference is taking place in April in Madrid.
“Most of the people who attend the conference are involved in W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, the main international standards organization for the Web,” Anderson said. “These are the people who continue to improve and build on the capabilities of the Web and find ways to allow it to be globally accessible. They are constantly working for a better future.” W3C was founded and is headed by Berners-Lee. After he worked to create the WWW in the late 1980s and early ‘90s he moved from CERN to MIT, where he founded W3C with support from DARPA and the European Commission. The consortium includes 419 global businesses, NGOs, universities and governmental entities which appoint representatives to work through W3C on Web standards.
For more on W3C, see: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/
The conference – co-chaired by Michael Rappa, Institute for Advanced Analytics, NC State, and Paul Jones, University of North Carolina, director of ibiblio – will be at the new Raleigh Convention Center ( http://www.raleighconvention.com/index.php/homepage/virtual-tour ), and it is expected to draw 1,000 people from all over the world.
Other members of the conference steering committee are:
Tom Rabon, Red Hat executive vice president, formerly of Lucent and AT&T
David Burney, founder and CEO of New Kind, formerly of Red Hat and Capstrat
Kemafor Anyanwu, North Carolina State University
Marshall Brain, HowStuffWorks.com
Charles Coleman, senior managing director at the SAS Institute
Tom Miller, North Carolina State University
Bob Young, Red Hat co-founder, now of Lulu
Those interested in participating in some way in brainstorming ideas for the conference can participate through the Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21978449959 ) and LinkedIn ( http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1810616 ) groups devoted to it.
On Facebook, there is an area on which students interested in volunteering to work at the event can sign up: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=21978449959&topic=13239
