Museums and the Web Conference Day 1

The opening plenary, Hands On the Internet, was presented by Michael Geist, from the University of Ottawa.

Internet 2008: what does it look like?

• Blogger has now overtaken CNN website, subject matter experts bringing their voice to their subject area
  
• Rise of Facebook and other social networking sites, talked about a Facebook group they set up Fair Copyright for Canada, which now has over 40,000 members
  
• Podcasting
  
• Postsecret – place for people to connect and talk anonymously about their secrets. Has become a supportive network
  
• Elephant's Dream – worlds first open movie
  
• New ways to distribute TV in shorter segments and across new platforms and websites - nature of broadcasting has fundamentally changed
  
• Tetesaclaquestv channel
  
• Creative commons licences
  
• Wikitravel – a comprehensive online travel guide community and collaboratively developed, is written in real time, able to personalise
  
• GlobalVoices – give voice to people wouldn't usually hear form, often at great risk, learn what's happening on the ground in those countries
  
• Using mapping technology to map events to share with the world, gave example of Usahidi that maps examples of violence in Kenya
  
• LibriVox sire to convert books into mp3 files
  
• Public Library of Science – peer reviewed open access peer-reviewed science journal. Met with much scepticism but now can't keep up with demand
  

Overall theme is the way web has encouraged collaboration, sharing and community, using open-source approaches to share information, and enabling the community to participate and take action.

Internet 2018: what should we be actively engaged in?

• Broadband for all
  
• Net neutrality
  
• Intermediary liability – third party content that may be hosted by you, need to be protected
  
• Privacy – need to make sure protections are robust
  
• Fair dealing/fair use – need for copyright balance, under and over protecting
  
• Digital rights management (DRM)
  
• Public domain – how long to extend rights protection?
  

Future of the internet is ion our hands.