So here I am at the second WikiMania conference, which is being held at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. I’m hunkered down in the main conference room waiting for the conference to begin; to my great delight, I was able to find a seat near an electrical outlet, and easily logged onto the Internet via Harvard’s wi-fi network..

Here’s the schedule for the conference, starting with an opening keynote address by the creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. Other speakers whose names I recognize include Judith Donath; Lawrence Lessig , author of The Future of Ideas, and Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which is currently being updated/revised in a wiki format); Yochai Benkler , author of The Wealth of Networks; technology writer/columnist Dan Gillmor; Mitch Kapor , founder of Lotus and designer of Lotus 1-2-3; Ben Shneiderman , author of several books on human-computer interfaces, including Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies; and wrap-up keynoter David Weinberger (author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web and co-author of the still-provocative 2001 book, The Cluetrain Manifesto: the end of business as usual). There are also several panels, and lots of other speakers I haven’t listed - not because they’re any less talented or knowledgeable than the names above, but simply because I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting them (yet).

Unfortunately, many of the sessions and panels are running in parallel, so I won’t be able to attend them all; but I’ll be posting random blot entries throughout the conference about the ones that I do attend.