(courtesy of suchit nanda)

I’m a notoriously bad note-taker, so as usual, no full report on this conference, but just a few notes and references.

Some conferences have a real magic, and the Asia Commons conference really had it. It is probably the first time that people from all across Asia, especially South Asia, but unfortunately only a rare smattering of Thais, though the conference took place in Bangkok. The magic came from several factors:
1) the ability to witness the emergence of a movement towards the Commons all across Asia and to see how easily and warmly the people there interconnected;
2) the meticulous organization of a very motivated staff, which chose to include a large part of Open Space processes so that participants really got to know each other; I discovered the method of ‘speed sharing‘ where every participant has 3 minutes to explain himself while everyone rotates so that he can here a maximum of contributions;
3) an integrated use of collaborative tools, both before and during the conference. And of course after the conference as well, as there is still a very active mailing list. See the overall wiki with the resource page for example.
So, without further ado, here are some links for those who weren’t there, but would like to know what was said. Here’s a record of the open space discussion, with lots of info on local Asian intiatives, and the topics that local activists care about.

Frederick Noronha, the tireless promoter of Bytes for All, which monitors ‘IT for development initiatives’, created an extra page for summaries in the Wikipedia. Frederick’s report is quite complete with details on the organizers and participants, the issues discussed, etc… The pictures are located here. Another way to follow what was being said is to monitor the blog, starting with the older blog entries at the beginning of the conference, where participants have posted reports on the keynote and other interventions. The most recent entries will lead you to the podcasts which were taped at the conference, including a short one by myself, on the collaborative aspects of working at the P2P Foundation.
Finally, I was of course very pleased with the profile of my own work, written by Fredrick Noronha and posted at the iCommons blog (this is the international initiative by Lawrence Lessig and crew to internationalise the Creative Commons licenses).