The website for the Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) Middle East project is now available online on IDRC site. This website provides detailed information about the project strategy, its thematic areas and implementation modalities.

In a nutshell, the ICT4D Middle East project aims to contribute to the emergence of an inclusive knowledge society in the Middle East through the establishment of a network of researchers that would work collaboratively on action research projects to create and share knowledge on the use of ICT for human, social and economic development.

The project includes five countries in the region: Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen, and covers four main thematic areas:

• Women’s Participation
• Education and Employability
• Governance
• Community and Local Development

This long-awaited publication paints an initial (yet colourful) picture of the status of the commons in Asia by profiling a collection of case studies, projects and initiatives in the continent.

The booklet was published by Creative Commons Australia (CCau) and the Creative Commons Clinic. It covers a variety of projects from Syria to New Zealand, and is full of colourful and exciting stories.

Arab Commons had its place in this publication, in which you can find updated statistics on the initiative’s achievements, in addition to two cases of Arab intellectuals and artists: Dr. Rayan El Helou and Hanadi Traifeh.

The Asia and the Commons booklet can be downloaded from here.

I will be organising a special track on Co-Creation, Co-Innovation and Open Innovation at the 14th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising in Lisbon - Portugal from 23-25 June 2008.

Below is the official Call for Papers.

Call for Papers

The unprecedented pace of technological development that characterises the 21st century, coupled with the increased connectedness of individuals and the democratisation of knowledge access and production tools have transformed the ways we interact, work, innovate and produce. The emerging Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs, wikis, social tagging and social networking, are empowering consumers to make more informed decisions and to demand more value from suppliers. While this highly dynamic environment poses significant challenges to companies that strive to cope with the connected, informed and demanding consumer, it also offers unique opportunities to tap into the collective knowledge and wisdom of the consumers’ communities to drive the innovation and product development process and to deliver products and services that satisfy the continuously changing requirements of the market. The Concurrent Enterprise is emerging as the new enterprise paradigm to capitalise on these opportunities and build the responsive firm of the future.

Online social networks are services that provide platforms to facilitate the development of social networks between people who share similar interests. Members of these services can connect with other members, develop their relationships, share ideas, content and activities and seek help and advice. Widely popular sites such as Facebook and My Space are just a few examples of this growing phenomena.

It has been argued that “distributed wisdom” within these networks can be an invaluable source of collectively built knowledge which can be exploited to provide answers to questions for which machines alone are incapable of addressing. One of the most significant applications is the utilisation of the social networks’ structures and knowledge to facilitate choice from the overwhelming options in the digital arena. Using their social networks, users can more effectively choose movies, videos, games, restaurants and gadgets) from the unlimited offerings available online. Recommender systems are developed particularly for this purpose, for which they tap into the information available inside the user’s social network to build what is called the user’s “web of trust” and then make relevant recommendations for this specific user. There are two approaches to the recommendation selection process. In the first approach, the recommendations are based on the ratings of available items by other members of the user’s web of trust. These ratings are weighted to reflect the trust level the user places in each member of the network. The second approach depends on comparing “tastes and preferences” of members of the social network to pick items which similar users liked, assuming that they will have higher potential of satisfying the user’s preferences.