The last day I had the opportunity to present news about the Open Research Society, basically the information in the new Web site of the NGO: http://the-ors.org
We hope that this helped for some people to be interested in the society to a degree in which they want to volunteer. After that, awards were given to the best papers, and the conference continued in the afternoon.
Surprisingly, the atmosphere at the sessions even improved when approaching the end of the conference (might be that the participants felt more comfortable with the others with time, thanks to the informal discussions at coffee break and lunch time). At the end of the day, I was sitting at the registration table, relaxing a little bit after three days of intense bombing of ideas.
In the image, left to right, Ambjörn Naeve, Maria Pavlis-Korres, me (Miguel-Angel Sicilia) and Miltiadis Lytras.
The second day started with a short talk by David Avison, president of AIS, an introduction by Ernesto Damiani, and then a keynote by Professor John Carroll. In the picture, Avison starting his presentation.
I was then chairing again a couple of sessions, this time in Auditorium B.
I had also the opportunity to present our latest research on openEHR and ontologies. That paper received one of the awards in the last day!
The life of the chairman is hard. 
One has to listen to all the presentations but also to be controlling speakers, which usually want to speak as much as they are allowed to 
So I was the day with the program and my watch. Fortunately, the sessions had lively discussions so the flow was perfect, and I enjoyed the atmosphere of friendliness and engagement.
Today 1st World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS’08) started.
The main organizer, Dr. Lytras, was deeply stirred during his wellcome talk. It was a hard job to manage the peer review, the preparation of manuscripts, the registration and the myriad of small details required for big events as this.
I (Miguel-Angel) was attending from the morning, chairing the sessions at Auditorium A. It was hard to avoid delays between sessions since there were interesting discussions between talks, but that’s how these events work!
Miguel-Angel is spending some days at Athens to attend a couple of events. He is staying at Avra Hotel in Athen’s port Rafina. This saturday he met Maria Pavlis-Korres to have a session of hard work on her Ph.D. Maria is enrolled at the Ph.D. program of the University of Alcalá, and she is working on teaching educators of special groups (more concretely, gypsies). This is a really interesting topic in the middle of andragogy and technology.
In the picture below, Miguel-Angel and Maria are reviewing the methodology and educational resources devised so far.
Miguel-Angel and Maria at Rafina, Athens
Miguel-Angel Sicilia gave a keynote at the “Workshop on Learning Technology Standards for Agriculture and Rural Development” (AgroLT), 19th September in Athens. The event was part of the 4th International Conference on ICT in Bio and Earth Sciences (HAICTA 2008). In the same session, Alberto Abián and Ramiro Cano talked about the latest progress in the Organic.Edunet platform. The event took place at the Agricultural University of Athens.
Incidentally, it was also collocated with the KKE Greek Communist Festival, so the University walls were full of slogans… that remembered older times in Spain.
These days the VIII Conference of the SEAE (Sociedad Española de Agricultura Ecológica) took place in Bullas, a pictoresque village in the province of Murcia. Bullas is the centre of the Bullas wine region so the local economy is wine-centric, and even a cellar built in the first half of the XIXth century can be visited in the Wine Museum of the town.
IE members Jesus Caceres (above) and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso were in Bullas diseminating the Organic.Edunet project and presenting a paper on the objectives and activities of this effort.
Miguel-Angel attended the 16th and 17th september the third meeting of the SSME Forum. It took place at the beautiful Palacio de la Magdalena, in Santander.
The session was about Service Science, Management and Engineering from the perspective of its development as a discipline in Spain (including SSME degrees). Several Universities are pushing to have their degrees devised soon to take up in this important but relatively new area of research.
IE members Miguel Angel and Salvador are now in Budapest to attend to the sessions of the Organic.Edunet third meeting.
We hope that this helped for some people to be interested in the society to a degree in which they want to volunteer. After that, awards were given to the best papers, and the conference continued in the afternoon.
In the image, left to right, Ambjörn Naeve, Maria Pavlis-Korres, me (Miguel-Angel Sicilia) and Miltiadis Lytras.
