It’s been a long day and I’m exceptionally bad at liveblogging, so I won’t even attempt to cover all the talks and sessions that happened today at iSummit 2008, instead I’ll just give a few thoughts and impressions.

We (Leonard, Hanako and I) arrived at the conference hall early enough to catch all the presentations. First came the morning keynote addresses, by Heather Ford, Jimmy Wales, Joi Ito, and Mohamed Nanabhay. For the most part these presentations didn’t do much for me, and I didn’t take notes since they were being liveblogged elsewhere anyway. The streaming video of Jimmy Wales live from San Francisco on Second Life was actually the strangest part of the whole morning (I am not a huge fan of Second Life to begin with, wish it would just die like it did in Japan.)

The show that saved the morning track though was without question Mohamed’s talk about open content on Al Jazeera. It was refreshing in that Mohamed brought a lot of very concrete practical tips on how to approach organizations that traditionally would be hesitant about releasing content on an open license. He made an important point about language, noting that while someone like Richard Stallman can insist on words like “free” in “free culture”, in the world of business you need to go with what works. He mentioned the book “The Starfish and the Spider” as an example of how to introduce the idea of open content in a way that will appeal to people who are in business.

Next the talks were divided among a whole slew of different sessions. Leonard and I followed the Local Context, Global Commons track, first for an “Introductions and goal setting” session and then a more concrete session on “Publishing in the Commons“.

I gave a talk in the latter publishing session, which meant that I wasn’t terribly focused on following the other talks (thinking about what I was going to say in my talk instead). The exception though was a short presentation by Tony Curzon Price of Open Democracy. Tony sketched the process Open Democracy has gone through, from an orientation first toward producers and consumers of content, then toward activists, and finally to becoming a community of editors. He described an editor in this context as “someone who solicits information and brings the best out of authors”.

Interestingly, and I think strongly connected to the way that Global Voices contributors are approached initially, Tony mentioned that authors (bloggers or other content-creators), when contacted by email and asked “wouldn’t it be interesting to write something” about such-and-such, often respond positively and end up writing something for Open Democracy.

He described what OD does as “providing a platform for people to come in and edit,” with the central community being “a community of people who follow writers.” He emphasized that OD has decided to “forget about the users, forget about the user-generated content, forget about the activists, concentrate on that little bit of the process that we think we know how to do” — which is editing. This whole idea made me think a lot, since we’ve been thinking about doing a similar thing in Japan, except rather than a community of editors, using a community of translators. Will have to think about that some more, but definitely food for thought.

A few more keynote tracks followed the publishing on the commons session, but I didn’t really catch enough in any detail to give a full report. Johanna Blakley’s talk about “Fashion and the Commons” really got me thinking, but unfortunately I missed the first half and never really caught up. Anthony Falzone spoke about the concept of Fair Use, but that was really too far from my area of interest to strike much of a chord with me.

Tomorrow we will be doing our session on “Open Content, Open Translation“, which I am looking forward to despite the fact that I expect a low turnout. All-in-all, I have met many great people, and have gotten a lot out of the summit so far. I have my reservations, but I think I’ll save them until later, when I can look back over everything as a whole and reflect on what the whole “isummit experience” is really about.