Conmergence

Call for Papers

The national network of scientists will facilitate the discovery of researchers and collaborators across the country. Institutions will participate in the network by installing VIVO, or by providing semantic web-compliant data to the network.

The VIVO National Conference, Enabling National Networking of Scientists, will bring together scientists, developers, publishers, funding agencies, research officers, students and those supporting the development of team science.

This two-day conference will begin with workshops and tutorials for those new to VIVO, those implementing VIVO at their institutions, and those wishing to develop applications using VIVO. Keynote speakers (to be announced) will present regarding the Semantic Web, Linked Open Data and the role of VIVO in support of team science. Panelists will discuss adoption and implementation findings. Feedback sessions will engage participants in requirements gathering and brainstorming regarding future network services. Presenters will discuss mapping, social networking, crowd sourcing, support for societies and other national network applications. For more information about the VIVO project and national networking, please visit http://vivoweb.org http://conferences.dce.ufl.edu/vivo/

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore (http://www.cis-india.org/).

CIS, in collaboration with Hivos’ Knowledge Programme (http://www.hivos.net/), launched a project, Digital Natives with a Cause?(http://www.cis-india.org/research/dn/dnrep) in 2008. As younger generations growing up in emerging information societies learn to engage with their geo-political and socio-cultural environments, a form of technology-mediated identity, popularly dubbed as the Digital Native, has been the discussion of a growing public and intellectual debate. These digital natives are transforming the ways in which they understand themselves as well as the world around them while engaging with Internet and digital technologies. Young users of technology are moving towards a reconfiguration of the world, where questions of identity, political participation, social transformation, cultural production, education, and livelihood are being restructured. The Digital Natives Research Programme focuses on producing new knowledge frameworks, vocabularies and lexicons to understand, investigate and support these new citizens or netizens rather who shall be the agents of change in the future. After the initial research (http://www.cis-india.org/publications/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf/view), CIS will gather responses from young users of technology to help us understand, document and support different practices aimed at social transformation and political participation more efficiently.

We believe that the world we live in is changing rapidly and the rise of Internet technologies has a lot to do with it. As young users of technology (as opposed to young users who use technology) adopt, adapt and use these new technologised tools to interact with their environment, new ways of effecting change emerge. This survey is an attempt to capture some of the information which gives us an insight into who the people are using these technologies, the ways in which they use them and what their perceptions and experiences are.

The survey will not take more than seven minutes of your precious time and it will help us get a better sense of the way things are. Please click here (http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dG9reUVvQ0w4d1ZER3lKOUtFanZMUnc6MA) to start the survey. We would also appreciate if you could share the link to the survey with your friends and relatives via your blog, tweets or other social networking pages. Your help would go a long way in enabling us to find out how the youth of today are shaping the society and influencing the political/social scenario around them. Please note that the data collected as part of the survey would be anonymous and not used for any commercial purposes. We would also acknowledge your help in preparing the final report.

In case you need any further information or clarifications, please feel free to call us at +91 – 080 – 25350955 or write to us at nishant@cis-india.org.

With best compliments,

Prasad

I have been thinking about #140conf NYC since I left the stage of the 92nd Street Y the evening of April 21st. On many levels we had a pretty amazing event. Over 1,000 people shared the experience in person and more than 170 people shared the stage in 76 different sessions. The crowd was not just a NYC audience. A large percentage of the people attending the event traveled to the conference from across the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. The live broadcast on Ustream, added a worldwide audience of 77,728 unique viewers / 128,664 total viewers. And on twitter, we were also one of the top 10 trending topics of the week.

Looking back at the conference, there were moments that were just surreal to me on both a personal level and business level and a lot of great content and energy was shared.

This iteration of #140conf was more about the evolution of our collective soul and the underlying effects on both our relationships with each other and the effects of this on businesses, institutions and organizations. Once again we had a chance to experience humanity and for some, the serendipity of the moment.

I enjoyed having Education as a focus of #140conf and the opportunity to provide a platform for educators who are changing the way they connect with their students because of the effects of the real-time internet. Overall, I especially enjoyed providing a platform to friends who might not have been that well known by our attending audience whose presence on the 92nd Street Y stage gave them a chance to get discovered by the #140conf community.

Looking at the event schedule ( http://nyc.140conf.com/schedule ) I am reminded about how great the speakers we had were in sharing their message. For example, Chris Lehmann was the first person to receive a standing ovation at the event. (Watch his session here ).

If you would like to catch up with the content shared at #140conf, it is now all available on-demand. Simply visit: http://nyc.140conf.com/schedule and click on the "Watch This" link.

I believe we are now in the very beginning stages of a social revolution which will redefine, maybe forever, the way we do business. The transition will be slower than some might expect, but as companies are discovering the benefits of listening to what their customers are saying using social communications, individual customers will discover the innate power they have (but don’t always know it) by simply speaking up, sharing their knowledge and often times serving as unpaid but passionate brand ambassadors The balance of power is shifting. A new era in buyer/seller relationships is being defined. And unlike other revolutions, this isn’t so much about the power of "we the people" but rather  "me the people." For the first time in a long time, our individual voices matter and each of us can effect change. When we work together, the chaining together of multiple "me’s" does empower a stronger and more powerful "we" the people but the point is that each of us matter in our own right and that at any given moment, any of us can and maybe will stand up and effect change. This shift will have possible dramatic effects in many other parts of the business, social, environmental, political and other ecosystems.

For the past year I have been exploring the effects of the emerging real-time internet on business while fighting the perception that #140conf was just a "twitter conference." I also took a gamble at the end of last year when I decided to reduce the price of our tickets to $140 for the two-day event. I left NYC with no regrets with that decision.

As the content DJ for #140conf, when I was working on the mixing of the schedule, I tried to share the voices of as many people from a variety of backgrounds and geographies as possible. My hope was for the people on stage to connect with various people in the audience and that at the end of two days, the effects of the worldwide systemic change the emerging real-time internet is having on our lives would become more obvious.

It will be the people at corporations, institutions and political organizations who allow themselves to connect with their digital souls who will maximize their respective company’s returns on investing in the real-time ecosystem. Don’t confuse the hugging you might have seen at the conference as #140conf not being a business event. Because it was. Maybe more business focused than we might appreciate.

I would like to believe that some of the connections made face-to-face at the event will have a positive effect for many of the attending delegates in the weeks, months and years ahead.

The conference happened because of the support of our speakers, delegates, sponsors and the volunteers who helped out with the on-site and some friends of mine who worked behind the scenes leading up to the conference. I appreciate the time everyone gave being at #140conf and the distances many of our speakers and delegates traveled to be there with us. I thank the work of everyone who contributed to the success of the event.

#140conf NYC was sponsored by: Kodak, gyPSii, Answers.com, Avaya, Best Buy, Jabra, tap11, Virgin America, Yahoo!, bing, keenkog, Oxygen, Phone.com, sprinklr, Roger Smith Hotel. I thank each of our sponsors for their support of the #140conf events.

I also thank the members of the media and various bloggers who helped amplify and tell our story. In just a few days, we had Forbes, WSJ, Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly and many others reporting. A summary of coverage to date may be viewed: here.

I am now working on the sessions for the upcoming #140conf events planned in Washington DC (June 17th), Tel Aviv (July 6th), Los Angeles (October 5/6) and London (October 26/27). If you have suggestions for topics you would like to see covered at future events or would like to either speak at a future conference, please let me know.

There are also the #140conf meetups. Please visit: http://meetup.com/140conf for an updated list of #140conf meetups currently planned.

To help cover the on-going costs of creating/producing/hosting the #140conf events, it seems I am always looking for sponsors. Any leads/suggestions/connections/contacts in this area are always welcome.

Best regards, Jeff

GLORIAD is built on a fiber-optic ring of networks around the northern hemisphere of the earth, providing scientists, educators and students with advanced networking tools that improve communications and data exchange, enabling active, daily collaboration on common problems. With GLORIAD, the scientific community can move unprecedented volumes of valuable data effortlessly, stream video and communicate through quality audio- and video-conferencing.

GLORIAD exists today due to the shared commitment of the US, Russia, China, Korea, Canada, the Netherlands and the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, to promote increased engagement and cooperation between their countries, beginning with their scientists, educators and young people. The benefits of this advanced network are shared with Science & Education (S&E) communities throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas.

GLORIAD provides more than a network; it provides a stable, persistent, non-threatening means of facilitating dialog and increased cooperation between nations that often have been at odds through the past century. This new era of cooperation will provide benefits not only to the S&E communities but to every citizen in the partner countries through:

These are a small sample of the literally thousands of active collaborations served by both the general and advanced network services provided by GLORIAD. To learn more about the applications using GLORIAD, browse the following pages. This site describes the currently operating GLORIAD network and plans to expand this to a much higher capacity and more capable infrastructure in the years ahead.

available here.

How Social Media Is Revolutionizing Community Building – And How Planners Can Manage It

By Mickey Murphy, Association Conventions & Facilities, themeetingmagazines.com

During a major conference that her firm was assisting, Julie S. McKown, communications strategist, Fusion Productions, was sitting backstage during a general session of the meeting. On the projection screen, rolling along in real-time, were tweets from attendees in the audience who were listening to the speaker’s remarks.

Expansion of Existing Research and Education Networks Are Key to Accelerating FCC National Broadband Plan Vision

Cypress, CA and Ann Arbor, MI, March 16, 2010 –  The Internet2 and National LambdaRail (NLR) communities strongly commend the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for emphasizing the importance of providing advanced broadband to community anchor institutions in its National Broadband Plan. The FCC plan outlines the goal of providing these institutions with one Gigabit per second (Gbps) connections as well as support for the development of a “Unified Community Anchor Network” (UCAN) that could be built leveraging existing non-profit research and education networks like Internet2 and NLR and their partner regional networks. UCAN would be dedicated to providing high-capacity nationwide connections for universities, schools, libraries, community colleges, healthcare providers, public safety entities, public media and other “community anchor institutions” across the country.

The FCC plan recognizes that these institutions have broadband needs that are substantially different than the needs of residential consumers and require far different capabilities in order to fulfill their missions and spur economic growth and opportunity. As the FCC recognizes in its plan, the nation does not have to start from scratch to connect the over 200,000 community anchor institutions across the country.

The FCC National Broadband Plan states, “In the past, the connectivity needs of research institutions have been met by non-profit research and education (R&E) networks such as Internet2 and National LambdaRail. R&E networks played a central role in the development and growth of the Internet itself through ARPANET and later NSFNET. Today, similar R&E networks provide high-speed (10 Mbps-1 Gbps) connectivity to 66,000 community anchor institutions. But more can be done—it is estimated that only one-third of anchor institutions have access to an R&E network today. This model should be expanded to other community institutions . . . .  Expanding the R&E network model to other anchor institutions would offer tremendous benefits.”

Almost fifteen years ago, universities banded together to create a structure of university-led non-profit R&E networks at the national, regional and state levels. National R&E backbones operated by Internet2 and NLR together with over 30 regional R&E networks connect an estimated 66,000 community anchor institutions across the country with very high performance, open networks engineered to meet the vast bandwidth needs of these organizations.

As the FCC plan suggests, building on the extensive investment the research and education community has already made in national network infrastructure and leveraging the human expertise and collaborations they have already developed would greatly accelerate the delivery of UCAN to all of the nation’s community anchor institutions. The R&E community detailed such a recommendation in a filing to the FCC in January 2010.

Glenn Ricart, NLR president and CEO, said, “At NLR we’ve seen based on our own experience how state, regional and national networks can collaborate to create a seamless, national broadband platform that has helped produce a quantum leap in research and education productivity.  We applaud the FCC for recognizing that equipping our community anchor institutions with 1-Gigabit or higher connectivity to each other and to state and national resources will similarly enable our schools, libraries, healthcare providers and other community-based organizations to be more productive and to deliver an enhanced array of services.  NLR enthusiastically supports the FCC’s bold vision for a National Broadband Plan and stands ready to work with all parties to consider how the existing network assets and expertise of the research and education community can contribute to making UCAN a reality.”

Doug Van Houweling, Internet2 president and CEO, said, “For over twenty years, students, faculty and researchers in our community have been using emerging broadband technologies to work together in virtual classrooms and collaborate in global laboratories. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan will help enable the same life-changing technologies at community anchor institutions nationwide. We look forward to working with the FCC to ensure that this visionary plan benefits fully from the existing network investments, leading-edge applications development, and technical expertise residing in the research and education community.”

Peter Siegel, CIO and vice provost of Information & Educational Technology for the University of California Davis, said, “When we consider the wealth of data coming online from across the community—electronic medical records, vast sky survey and physics data, genome sequencing, as well as data on the natural forces that surround us—we are at a real tipping point, where researchers, policy makers, students, critical service providers, and health care workers will be able to generate and depend on timely, effective, and in many cases life saving, information that will be available instantly. The FCC’s clear vision and goals are the catalyst for moving us forward, by ensuring that the community anchor institutions are able to join together in a sustainable way to create, use, and build on these unprecedented and priceless sources of information.”

Robert Musgrove, president of Pine Technical College, said, “Our rural community & technical colleges are the anchor institutions that are critical in any effort to expand Internet2-level broadband into under-served rural communities. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan recognizes that reality and represents a major strategic step forward in bringing rural America onboard to realize the benefits of high speed Internet connectivity. A unified community anchor network is a solid and achievable tactic for this important strategy.”

Carol Willis, manager of the Texas Education Telecommunications Network (TETN) which is dedicated to serving the K20 community in Texas, said, “The research and education community has for close to a decade promoted the use of advanced networks among the K20 community by providing state education networks access to nationwide research and education networks – creating, in essence, a ‘National Education Grid.’ A unified community anchor network that builds on this success represents an opportunity to not only reach many more community anchor institutions in the US but also expand the diverse collaborative community of K20 innovators and expertise developed by our national initiative and others.”

National Emergency Number Association CEO Brian Fontes said, “The transition to Next Generation 9-1-1 and emergency communications systems depends on access to specialized high-capacity broadband networks like those operated by the research and education community today. The development and availability of a community anchor network for public safety is an important step toward making a nationwide Next Generation 9-1-1 system a reality.”

Carla Smith, executive vice president of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) said, “Providing reliable high speed broadband that builds on the success of the research and education community is critical to improving the quality, safety of – and access to – healthcare and is necessary to ensure the successful deployment of health information technology across the US.”

Dr. Timothy Lance, president and chair of NYSERNet, the regional research and education network serving the State of New York, said, “The FCC has embedded in policy the role that community anchor institutions and the networks that served them have played in advancing the state of the art of networking, from the first public use of the Internet protocol with NSFNET and creation of the original regional networks a quarter century ago, to building the first ISPs by the regionals shortly thereafter, to deployment of modern optical networks and network technologies today. This plan helps sustain the extraordinary symbiosis here between this research and education networking community and their mission driven ability to experiment with the network’s future, and the carrier and technology community with which we have worked.”

Christa Werle, electronic services coordinator for Sno-Isle Libraries in Washington state, said, “Increasingly, our patrons are coming to the library in search of media-rich interactive online content and experiences often not available in their homes. Simultaneously, in addition to traditional print resources, libraries are offering more downloadable and streaming content requiring robust broadband connectivity to access. Moving forward, the creation of UCAN will help libraries provide the online experiences that our students, job searchers, small-business owners, and families need and want.”

# # #

About Internet2

Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium led by the research and education community. An exceptional partnership spanning U.S. and international institutions who are leaders in the worlds of research, academia, industry and government, Internet2 is developing breakthrough cyberinfrastructure technologies that support the most exacting applications of today—and spark the most essential innovations of tomorrow. Led by its members and focused on their current and future networking needs since 1996, Internet2 blends its human, IP and optical networks to develop and deploy revolutionary Internet technologies. Activating the same partnerships that produced today’s Internet, our community is forging the Internet of the future. For more information, see http://www.internet2.edu.

About National LambdaRail (NLR)

Owned and operated by the U.S. research and education community and dedicated to serving the needs of researchers and educators, NLR is the innovation platform for some of the world’s most demanding research projects and a wide range of public-private partnerships.  NLR’s coast-to-coast, high-performance network infrastructure offers unrestricted usage and bandwidth, a choice of cutting-edge network services and applications, and customized support for individual researchers and projects.  For more information, please visit www.nlr.net.

Media Contacts

Kristina Scott, NLR, 650.678.9034, kscott@nlr.net

Lauren Rotman, Internet2, 202.331.5345, lauren@internet2.edu

Contact NLR

We welcome your questions and feedback.

Contact us at editor@nlr.net.

National LambdaRail (NLR)

P.O. Box 1610, Cypress, CA 90630

Top Houston Hospital Selects MedConcierge to Offer
Telemedicine to Corporations and Master Planned
Communities

September 8, 2009 (Sarasota, FL & Houston, TX) – St. Joseph Medical Center, the largest, Level 3 trauma hospital in downtown Houston, has selected MedConcierge to provide its advanced telemedicine solution to leading communities and corporations. Both parties will demonstrate the user experience and benefits of telemedicine during the upcoming 2009 FTTH Conference & Expo taking place at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, September 27th through October 1st.

"We are very excited to demonstrate the MedConcierge at St. Joseph Medical Center service to local community developers and corporate executives at the upcoming Fiber to the Home Conference," states St. Joseph chief executive officer Phillip D. Robinson, "Telemedicine will clearly be at the center of healthcare delivery moving forward and leveraging the technological advantages of the MedConcierge service over fiber-optic communications will help us extend patient services, generate additional revenue and save costs."

"St. Joseph is a leader in the Houston area, and we are thrilled to play a role in helping them deliver health and wellness services to residents of FTTH communities in and around the Houston metropolitan area," says MedConcierge director Rob Scheschareg. "Telemedicine offers competitive and financial benefits in a cost-effective fashion that is critical in today's market environment. We look forward to meeting service providers and developers at the FTTH Conference & Expo who want to take advantage of the billions being spent by consumers and the government in the next 30 months on home-based telemedicine."

Substantial news coverage, increasing consumer interest and adoption, and the allocation of billions of dollars in Federal stimulus funds specifically for broadband and healthcare information technology have placed telemedicine at the forefront of applications that benefit from fiber to the home networks.

"Fiber to the home provides benefits to consumers and employers that truly improve the quality of life. From our own industry research to that of our members and market followers, it is becoming increasingly evident that consumers want the benefits of improved healthcare services and access to doctors that services like MedConcierge and healthcare providers like St. Joseph can provide," states Joe Savage, president of the FTTH Council. "Telemedicine is a prime example of the type of applications that will be on display at our upcoming conference demonstrating the power of fiber".

To showcase the user experience, benefits and implementation of telemedicine services, MedConcierge and St. Joseph Medical Center will be hosting a number of activities at the upcoming 2009 FTTH Conference & Expo.  These include:

Corporate VIP Demonstration & Reception, Tuesday, September 29th.  For more information call the Corporate Health Connection at St. Joseph Medical Center at (713) 756-8600. 

MedConcierge Booth in the Fiber Zone, located on the show floor during exhibit hours. 

Phillip D. Robinson, CEO, St. Joseph Medical Center will be discussing telemedicine over FTTH networks as part of the Closing Keynote presentation Wednesday, September 30th at 2:00 pm.

For information about these events, visit the conference website at http://www.ftthconference.com.

About St. Joseph Medical Center

St. Joseph Medical Center, downtown Houston's only general acute care hospital, partners with Houston physicians to provide comprehensive health care to all.  As Houston's first hospital, St. Joseph Medical Center provides services for outpatients as well as inpatients, with a full continuum of care in surgery, cancer care, emergency care, Women's services, cardiovascular services, wound care, rehab, sports medicine, Corporate Health Connection and more. For more information on St. Joseph Medical Center, please visit http://www.sjmctx.com or call 713.757.1000.

About MedConcierge, LLC

MedConcierge is the leading provider of telemedicine solutions for community developers and operators, broadband service providers, healthcare providers, and municipalities, that deliver personal, concierge healthcare services to consumers at home, at work and while traveling. Utilizing our award-winning, patent-pending technology, MedConcierge provides unparalleled private and secure access to certified doctors, specialists and content. MedConcierge offerings range from real-time, live videoconference consultations, on demand, 24/7 with leading doctors, specialists, psychiatrists and wellness experts, to educational content, health status monitoring and dynamic electronic medical records – all accessible from the comfort, privacy and convenience of homes and facilities. For more information, visit http://www.medconcierge.com.

From Telework Exchange Newsletter: 

Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine today announced that Virginia teleworkers saved approximately $113,000, avoided driving 140,000 miles, and removed 75.89 tons of pollutants from the air through participation in Telework Day on August 3, 2009.

“I commend the individuals and organizations that took the Telework Day pledge,” Governor Kaine said. “The results are clear – telework plays an important role in meeting the Commonwealth’s green objectives, reducing strain and traffic on our roads, increasing savings for our employees, and will provide our businesses with increased employee productivity.”

The “What We Saved; What We Learned” report, compiled by Telework Exchange, also reveals an increase in productivity by participants and reports satisfaction with their teleworking experience.

Key findings:

• 4,267 employees teleworked on Telework Day – 22% of participants never teleworked before Telework Day; 95% of participants located in Virginia
• 69% of Virginia Telework Day participants said they accomplished more than on a typical day at the office
• 91% of Virginia Telework Day participants say they are now more likely to telework in the future
• Teleworking one day per week delivers approximately $2,000 in savings to each teleworker annually

To download the full report, please visit http://www.teleworkexchange.com/teleworkdayreport/.

Throughout August and September, the FCC is holding a series of workshops to support the Commissioners as they draw up a national broadband plan. These sessions focused on broadband’s impact on the economy, especially in rural areas, and on skills training and job hunting. The Recovery Act calls for a plan to be submitted to Congress by Feb. 17, 2010.
Washington, DC

AM Session

PM Session

Track

http://twitter.com/fccdotgov

Hashtag: BBwkshp

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23BBwkshp