I had the unique opportunity this year to visit CERN’s Large Hadron Collider a day after LIFT Conference 2008, an experience which helped me to understand better CERN and its innovation. I was in a group together with Bruce Sterling, Ben Segal, Robert Scoble (who did the video below), Aral Balkan and others. Below is a video which helps you understand what is happening underneath CERN research and scientific labs. Thanks to Robert Scoble for recording and putting it live in FastCompany.tv.

I’m going to LIFT Conference 2008 with set of tools to create, share and present. I will create network possibly by increasing my Linkedin connections, I will share conversation and a presence during LIFT08 with Twitter, and will get much social with Facebook (physical contacts only).

Here is the trend graph of recent months popularity of these social networks:

Meanwhile I will have a possibly to present my open stage proposition: How innovative projects can transform education and ICT opportunities. (Your vote and support is highly appreciated at this stage).

And the most important part is to meet with network of people i created last year, compliments to LIFT team for making the event this year much more valuable to be part of it.

LIFT Conference is about to start soon, this time richer with program attached with preliminary network using social media softwares. As last year main discussion during the breaks was Twitter, this year it Facebook will dominate the field. The recent report provided by Glen O’Neil on Network Mapping shows the increase of network among participants, this time I expect an increase of 30% of contacts in Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

1. Write a new business plan idea each quarter
2. Wake up one hour earlier and go to sleep a hour earlier than in 2007
3. Subscribe to The Economist, Time Magazine, Wired this year.
4. Read books about Airlines Industry
5. Use often my new Sony DSCT70B Digital Camera and buy a Flickr Pro account
6. Spend less time typing in Instant Messaging applications, using Twitter as alternative channel
7. Use Skype for booking conference calls
8. Fly only with Miles and More partners in order to use Fly Award points to flights.
9. Not trying to beat my air-travel stats from 2007 (16 Take-Offs)
10. Learn cooking and finally get a driving license this year.

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment. Wikipedia.org

Florence Devouard the chairwoman of Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia spoke about “Wikipedia: a social innovation ?” at LIFT07 on February 8, 2007 she covered the basic facts of wikipedia worldwide and the comparisons between the other encyclopedia and wikipedia model, she also mentions wikipedia upcoming solutions such as delivery wikipedia entries in other formats for the countries not having access online such as freely licensed text-books that will make another revolution education in future.

Wikipedia.org invites everyone to take a part online and create articles they opened the gate for online citizens, to contribute on the website of entire humanity, letting people to create articles and make them responsible for the content they create.

But what remains the biggest challenge for Wikipedia is the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) since many users today are using the biased sources from text-books who are also biased on their way as a reference to create articles. This brings controversy among many online activists who try to create articles based on facts as a primary source.

An example can be Kosovo article in Wikipedia which is still stub and closed for editing cause of vandalism by contributors, if you monitor this page u can see the history of editing is much frequented and never the truth appears on the Kosovo article. So there is a lot to do in NPOV

Apart from the Florence discussion, there was a simple mistaken discussion about that Wikipedia has money for another three months which got exploded in Blogosphere the next day after her speech and this is what makes blogging attractive. The video explains it all on what Florence Devouard and Laurent Haug really discussed.

Language is major issue on wikipedia which seems to be very English-centered way of creating articles. On wikipedia stats regarding the languages I took these facts about wikipedia articless in languages around in balkans, where Romanian language leads in there.

Romanian: 58 496 articles
Slovenian: 45 900 articles
Serbian: 43 824 articles
Bulgarian: 37 533 articles
Croatian: 29 414 articles
Bosnian: 17 259 articles
Albanian: 14 279 articles
Macedonian: 9 348 articles

Enjoy the Wikipedia story on LIFT07

I’m republishing LIFT07 Conference videos every weekend with notes I took on each presentations I attended to let my readers enjoy these fabulous videos offered by LIFT07 organizers.
LIFT is a conference about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society hold on 7-8-9 February 2007 Geneva, Switzerland