Meetup at the Semantic Technology Conference 2010 in San Francisco

This year our Alliance Semantic Web meetup event will take place at the Semantic Technology Conference 2010 in San Francisco. Come and meet your peers to discuss all things Semantic Web, Web 3.0 and Linked Data to make the Web of Data a reality. It took more than 10 years to get the Semantic Web initiative where it is today and we have good reason to believe that it's about time to hit the mainstream web. This I believe will not happen without friction since the standards in the Semantic Web initiative are geared towards a more academic audience rather than web practitioners. With the growing adoption in the mainstream community this might require some minor review of some recommendations, additional training documentation and more tools for development. So it's interesting times again, I hope to see you in San Francisco this summer.

Special Guest: Howard Rheingold - Semantic Social Networks and Smart Mobs

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle." A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages.

The pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on Internet auction site eBay is part of it. Research by biologists, sociologists, and economists into the nature of cooperation offer explanatory frameworks. At least one key global business question is part of it - why is the Japanese company DoCoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while US and European mobile telephony operators struggle to avoid failure?

The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.

Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy-protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests?

Howard Rheingold is one of the world's foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. Over the past twenty years he has traveled around the world, observing and writing about emerging trends in computing, communications, and culture. One of the creators and former founding executive editor of HotWired, he has served as editor of The Whole Earth Review, editor-in-chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and on-line host for The Well. The author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Virtual Reality, and Tools for Thought, he lives in Mill Valley, California.

Participating Meetup groups (5093 members)

Atlanta - Austin - Cambridge - Chicago - Frankfurt - Central Florida - London - Los Angeles - Munich - New York - Philadelphia - Oslo - Ottawa - Princeton - San Diego - San Francisco - Santiago - Seattle - Silicon Valley - Thessaloniki - Toronto - Vancouver - Vienna - Washington DC

Proposed Sessions

Monday	June 21	Pre-conference Day	Semantic Code Camp 2010
Tuesday	June 22	First Conference Day	Big Meetup Social
Wednesday	June 23	Second Conference Day	Semantic Social Networks - Meetup Ontology (or on June 23)
Thursday	June 24	Third Conference Day	Incentives & Roadblocks for Participating in the Semantic Web (or on June 22)
Friday	June 25	Fourth Conference Day	LODE: Linking Open Descriptions of Events