Podcasts from CNI Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting

We've concluded this round of podcasts from CNI's Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting.

This series of recordings included interviews with (click on the name to hear podcast):

John Wilbanks, Vice-President of the Science Commons Project. Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons, has three interlocking initiatives designed to accelerate the research cycle. These include making scientific research “re-useful”, enabling “one-click” access to research materials, and integrating fragmented information sources. Together, these intiatives form the building blocks of a new collaborative infrastructure to make scientific discovery easier by design. Wilbanks discusses the copyright and technical challenges of contemplating a true knowledge browser.

Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). Alexander presented the NITLE Prediction Markets, a research project and website which hosts a game of virtual futures markets, but about trends and ideas rather than goods, and using pretend money instead of the real thing.  The idea is to use the market framework to elicit distributed intelligence about emerging trends.

Chris Prom, Assistant University Archivist and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prom is part of team that developed the Archon software, which was awarded the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration.

Andrew Torget, Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. The Digital Scholarship Lab is a center for innovation, bringing together scholars, technologists, and the public in order to explore how emerging technology can change the ways we understand the human past, present, and future. Two of the projects discussed in this interview include “Voting America” and the “History Engine.”

Ann J. Wolpert, Director of Libraries at MIT. As Director of Libraries, Ann J. Wolpert is responsible for the MIT Libraries and MIT Press. The MIT Libraries consist of five major collections, a number of smaller branch libraries in specialized subject areas, a fee-for-services group, and the Institute Archives. In addition, the development of DSpace, MIT's online institutional repository contains MIT Research in digital form, including preprints, technical reports, working papers, theses, conference papers, images, and more.

Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and the person most often called the "father of the internet." He attended the CNI 2008 Fall Task Force Meeting to hand out the Mellon | Awards for Technology Collaboration. The interview was published as part of EDUCAUSE's monthly podcast, EDUCAUSE Now, and starts about eight minutes into the show.

Jeff Bigham, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington and Richard Ladner, Boeing Professor in Computer Science and Engineering also at the University of Washington. Bigham and Ladner developed the WebAnywhere web application which was awarded the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. WebAnywhere is a web-based, self-voicing web browser that enables blind web users to access the web from almost any computer that can produce sound without installing new software.

John Bradley, Senior Analyst for Humanities Computing at King's College London. Bradley created Pliny, a software tool which facilities note-taking and annotation -- a key element of Humanities research for many scholars. This open-source tool was awarded the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

Stephen C. Buckley, Executive Director and Tom Yu, Development Team Leader, both from the MIT Kerberos Consortium. Kerberos is a computer authentican network protocol, which allows individuals communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. This open-source tool was awarded the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

Martin Ramsey, President and founder of CEATH Company and founder and facilitator of LAMP, which was awarded the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration. LAMP is the Learning Asset Management Project of the Appalachian College Association (ACA).  It is a collaborative community of learners, linked via a common software platform and a shared learning and collaboration philosophy, across five states in central Appalachia.

Edward Fox, Professor for the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Digital Library Research Laboratory at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Fox participated in the panel discussion, "Capturing Crisis: A Digital Library to Study Tragedy and Recovery from Around the World."

We are grateful for the participation of all interviewees and look forward to having more opportunities to share insights and information from people representing an equally diverse range of viewpoints in the future.

We hope you've enjoyed this content and we'd like your feedback. If you have ideas for future coverage, please leave us a comment or email gbayne@educause.edu.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2008 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org