The OpenOffice.org Community invites potential speakers to submit
proposals for papers for the OpenOffice.org annual international
conference, OOoCon 2008. Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have
never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to
share about OpenOffice.org - we want to hear from you. Please note the
Conference language is English.

OOoCon 2008 - to be held in Beijing, China from 5th-7th November - will
see the biggest concentration of OOo developers ever assembled in one
location on this planet. For this reason, we particularly welcome
proposals from developers with information to share with fellow
developers, from how to get started with simple extensions, through to the
deep, dirty, and downright technical aspects of hacking the OpenOffice.org
codebase.

Papers are also welcomed on any topic of interest to the Community: to the
thousands of people who have joined one of our Projects and design,
develop, maintain, translate, test, document, support, promote, or in any
other way help us bring OpenOffice.org's products and services to the
world. As this is the first OOoCon to be held in Asia, we encourage local
communities to submit papers for a special feature on local success
stories.

For further details of how, where, and when to submit a proposal:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/cfp

For further details of OOoCon 2008:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008

The conference organisers look forward to hearing from you!

The OOoCon 2008 organising committee.

The role of expert knowledge is central to a video documentary on Wikipedia's way of knowledge sharing. It features the opinions of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, as well as of some other major Web 2.0 players and critics, including the authors Tim O’Reilly and Andrew Keen as well as Charles Leadbeater (a former advisor to Tony Blair), Bob McHenry (former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and Ndesanjo Macha, one of the first to blog in an African language and one of the major contributors to the Swahili Wikipedia (which, by the way, is about to reach the 7,000 article milestone within the next few days).

The views of these people, particularly on truth and its representation in encyclopedias, contrast quite significantly but their aggregation provides food for thought on how the future of knowledge sharing might look like. The explicitly scientific perspective was mainly missing but between the lines, it became clear that large interactively collaborative (ubuntu) projects like this might also play an increasingly important role in academic research and tertiary education.

One possible direction is a continuation and expansion of Wikipedia until saturation, other options include branching and the development of more academically inclined variants like Scholarpedia, the Encyclopedias of Earth and Cosmos as well as Citizendium (not mentioned in the documentary but in a previous post here), and there are certainly many other possible developments.