The iCommons summit brings together several hundred of the major pioneers, big thinkers, activists and developers working for an "open internet." This year's gathering takes place from June 15-17 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The convocation is full of internet rock-stars like Larry Lessig and Joi Ito of Creative Commons , Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales and CTO of Linden Labs, Cory Ondrejka.
For those not lucky enough to be able to get to Dubrovnik, this year the organizers are attempting to enable virtual participation in the proceedings via Second Life:
The aim of running the iSummit 2007 in Second Life is to mix the real and virtual world for both attendees of the Summit, and for those who are unable to make it to Dubrovnik, thus expanding the community who will be able to learn, collaborate and share their knowledge and experiences of the Summit. The parallel summit will also help to introduce new users to Second Life and to build the global diversity of participants who are collaborating in-world.
What that will mean in practice is a bit unclear. It might just mean that the moderators will take a couple of IMed questions from residents watching the video stream in SL. But I would hope that they are thinking a bit more creatively about how to bridge the gap between virtual and physical participants. I.e. in-world break-out sessions, presentations from SL to the real conference, tours and discussion of open source tech in SL, etc.
The in-world conference will take place on USC's Annenberg Island (teleport SLURL.) Here's the schedule of what is being broadcast in-world from the conference.
