The program for the First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture has been announced:

We received 29 submissions for research presentations and each submission was reviewed by at least 3 reviewers, sometimes more! So the total was about 90 reviews written in a rather short amount of time. Of course we’re talking about extended abstracts here so reviews were sometimes very short, but this is still quite an achievement I believe. After careful consideration of the review results and other factors (having a good mix of presentations, diversity, inclusion, expected interest) we decided among the chairs to accept 16 papers for presentation (55% acceptance rate) and another 5 for posters.

Generally many papers received favorable reviews, even if some reviews were quite critical, so we opted for a model of maximum inclusion, where we want to give everyone with a sufficiently interesting submission a chance to present their work. The inevitable downside is that the research track will dedicate a fair amount of time to traditional “academic” presentations, but we have made space for a 1-hour speedgeeking session and a 1.5 hour open discussion on setting a commons research agenda. Also, all participants will naturally be able to mingle with every other isummit participant during breaks, social events, etc, so overall there should be a fair balance between ad-hoc participation and structured presentations.

Congratulations to researchers with accepted submissions and the workshop chairs, Giorgos Cheliotis, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, and Jonathan Zittrain.

The workshop runs for three days, July 30-August 1 in Sapporo, Japan in conjunction with iSummit’08. We posted about the workshop CFP in April.