Details of the plenary talks to be given at the workshop are now available from the Web site. [07 May 2008]

[Capital FM] Nairobi -- Senators have threatened to impose a censure motion on Health Cabinet Secretary Deborah Barasa and her counterpart for Tourism Rebecca Miano for failing to appear before the house plenary.

The third plenary of Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) will be held from the 12.-17. January 2015 in Bonn, Germany where also EU BON partners will attend. The IPBES secretariat already released some information notes and documents for participants that plan to join the sessions. In addition to that, some working documents for IPBES-3 are released in the meantime, like the provisional agenda and others. There are also reports being published that are relevant for the work of biodiversity networks like EU BON. Interesting reports are for example the draft of the assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services in Europe and Central Asia (where EU BON is mentioned as a relevant research network) and other working documents for the plenary.

Please find the documents under the following link that will guide you to the specific IPBES webpage: http://ipbes.net/plenary/ipbes-3.html#three

The GEO-XII Plenary and Ministerial Summit, as well as many associated meetings and events were hosted by the Mexican Government and took place in Mexico City from 9 to 13 November 2015.

The five-day event brought together GEO member countries and organizations, as well as scientists and stakeholders from across the world to debate the next decade for GEO, and to discuss the latest developments in Earth Observation technologies and applications. The GEO-XII Plenary approved the GEO Strategic Plan 2016-2025, and the Summit endorsed a Mexico City Declaration (see: http://www.earthobservations.org/geo12.php).

Mexican music and folklore performances at the hosted conference dinner at GEO-XII; Credit: Hannu Saarenmaa

EU BON participated at GEO-XII and was represented at the European Commission Stand "Europe for GEOSS" with a poster and a short video clip. A real highlight was the visit by the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas. During his short visit, the Commissioner took specific interest in the project and spent some time discussing EU BON's relevance with the coordinator and his staff.

   
The EC stand "Europe for GEOSS" at GEO-XII, and discussions on EU BON with Commissioner Carlos Moedas; Credits:  Jose Miguel Rubio Iglesias (left), Helmut Staudenrausch (right)

EU BON was also presented during a dedicated side event entitled "The GEO Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON): Enhancing Biodiversity Observations and Products for User Needs". The project’s key products were introduced by the project coordinator Christoph Häuser and the workpackage 2 leader Hannu Saarenmaa.

The GEO XIII Plenary in St. Petersburg  enjoyed a huge interest and support from many member governments, agencies and networks with around 400 registered participants this year.

Having taken place from 7-10 November 2016, the event featured a plenary, a number of side events and exhibition to give a chance to participants to meet up and discuss ideas and progress.

  
Left: The EU BON booth at the GEO exhibition - F. Wetzel, Ch. Häuser, H. Saarenmaa; Right: Director General  J.E. Smits and Christoph Häuser; Credits: F. Wetzel

The second session of the IPBES plenary (IPBES-2) is now assigned to be held in Antalya, Turkey from 9 to 14 December 2013, following the decision of the IPBES Bureau.

As part of the current intersessional process, various draft documents prepared by the Bureau and Multidisciplinary Expert Panel will be available online for review at: www.ipbes.net/intersessional-process. These includes the draft IPBES work programme, stakeholder engagement strategy, guidance on the development of strategic partnerships, and procedures for the preparation of IPBES deliverables. In addition, various regional consultations in preparation for IPBES-2 are also under preparation. Further details can be found at www.ipbes.net/related-events.

The deadline for registration is August 19th, and it should be noted that it will not be possible for any non-government observers who were not present at IPBES-1 to register to participate in IPBES-2 after this date.

Details of the online registration process can be found at www.ipbes.net/plenary/registration-ipbes-2 

The Eleventh Plenary Session of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO-XI), hosted by Switzerland, will take place in Geneva at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), from 13 to 14 November 2014. 

The Plenary, Side Events, and all other related meetings will take place in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) building, located at 7 bis, avenue de la Paix, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland.

The Group on Earth Observations is coordinating efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS. GEO was launched in response to calls for action by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and by the G8 (Group of Eight) leading industrialized countries. These high-level meetings recognized that international collaboration is essential for exploiting the growing potential of Earth observations to support decision making in an increasingly complex and environmentally stressed world.

More information about the event is available here: http://www.earthobservations.org/geo11.php

More information: https://rd-alliance.org/plenary-meetings/rda-fifth-plenary-meeting.html

The Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) is organising the GFOI Plenary and Open Forum to be hosted by the European Space Agency in Frascati, Italy from 22 February 2016 – 26 February 2016.

The fourth session of the IPBES Plenary is now set to be held from 22 to 28 February 2016 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

So far only a provisional agenda for the fourth session of the Plenary is available.

The deadline for registration has been set for 15 September 2015.

More information to follow.

The GEO XIII Plenary will take place on 9 & 10 Nov 2016 in St. Petersburg, Russia. More information to follow.

The Fifth Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) will take place from 6 to 10 March 2017, in Bonn, Germany

At IWMW 2006 as a pilot a number of the plenary talks are being made available over the Web using streaming video. [2006-06-13]

All plenary speaker's presentations are now available from the IWMW 2006 Web site. See relevant abstracts for links. [2006-06-16]

A multimedia presentation of Stephen Emmott's talk on "Customers, Suppliers, and the Need for Partnerships" is now available. The presentation, which is in SMIL format, combines a recording of Stephen's talk with a display of the PowerPoint slides he used. [2005-07-26]

Paul Boag, from Headscape, considers how social participation is the cornerstone of the web 2.0 movement and has been spearheaded by sites such as digg.com. One of the underlying principles of these sites is that peer to peer recommendations carry more weight than those from either a search engine or from corporate advertising. The commercial sector has been quick to adopt this peer review mechanism with customer reviews and ratings. This talk proposes to explore how social participation can be applied to the process of recruiting new students and what lessons can be learnt from the approach adopted by the commercial sector. We will also look at what institutional barriers exist that prevent this approach and how these can be overcome.

Peter Reader, University of Bath explains that E-communications, e-marketing and social media are hot topics for university marketers and communicators, with old ideas of 'control' looking more and more unrealistic. Now the talk is of 'influence', viral marketing, students as customers, and of client management, with the web and web technologies seen increasingly as the university's most important marketing tools. So what are the challenges, and what are the issues with which marketers will face us? Expect more of "why" and "want" than of "how"!

Arthur Clune, Honeynet Project, discusses how attacks on Web servers, and internet connected devices in general have become both more common and more sophisticated in recent years. This talk will look at how people attack Web servers, and what they are hoping to gain from it, based on data from the Honeynet Project's deployment of Honeypot servers worldwide.

During Keith Doyle, Salford University talk, delegates will discover how, by taking the information architecture approach as their next step, they can improve the user experience and business benefits. Information architecture gives delegates a framework and benchmarks for managing web provision at an institutional level. This should be an engaging and entertaining talk which would help delegates decide whether a formal IA role is appropriate to their organisation. Helping delegates consider their institutional strategic approach: What is IA? How is the role covered at the moment? Should it be a specific post rather than something that's squeezed in with everything else we do?

Drew McLellan will talk about how every time non-semantic markup is used, a piece of data dies. Data was born to be shared. Discover how the use of semantic markup and microformats can obsolete common read-heavy APIs and can be paired with identity protocols and OpenID to provide casual APIs for the loosely coupled generation.

Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services (Senior Manager, Web Services Evangelism) will discuss Amazon's approach to Web-scale computing. Using this new approach, developers can use Amazon's broad line of web services to rapidly and cost-effectively build scalable and flexible Web applications. Jeff will focus on Amazon's newest services, including the Simple Queue Service, the Simple Storage Service, and the Elastic Compute Cloud. The talk will include technical details and an overview of how the services are being used by customers all over the world.

Alison Wildish, Head of Web Services, Edge Hill University will talk about how Students are asking each other for help and advice rather than coming direct to our staff. These same students are advising our applicant community about University life and they're all doing it in an "informal" environment. These are all positive developments but it does mean we start to ask the question... if we're moving towards developing and nurturing students in these online communities and empowering them to help themselves, will we still need a "corporate" Web site in the future? Furthermore with the increase in "free" tools available such as email, file storage, blogs etc. - will Institutional systems be a thing of the past?

Steven Warburton will discuss how the notion of community continues to be recognised as a fundamental aspect within descriptions of shared human activity and group bonding. In his socio-cultural analysis of the work place Wenger defined a particular type of communion, which he termed a community of practice (CoP). The concept of a CoP has been somewhat abused in current literature yet it does provide valuable insights into how communities evolve, behave and sustain themselves. By elaborating dimensions of community such as shared practice, dialogue, legitimate peripheral participation and negotiation of boundaries, Wenger has provided a model that can be applied to a number of differing groups of activity. This talk will explore what we can draw from the work on CoPs, in terms of the role and identity of institutional web manager, one that is inseparable from a field of practice that remains dynamic, fluid and under constant negotiation.

Andy Powell gave a talk about how it goes without saying that the Web has changed significantly over the last 10 years and that institutional Web sites have changed with it - just use the Wayback Machine to look back at your own site in 1996 to see what I mean. Such changes have not simply been in terms of style and substance but also in terms of how we expect to interact with, use and re-use the content and services being made available to us. In short, the Web has changed us and the way we learn and work. This talk will look back over the last 10 years and highlight some of the key technical, social, political and legal changes that have taken place and the impact these have had on the institutional Web sites we deliver now and will deliver into the future.

Randy Metcalfe, OSS Watch and Brian Kelly, UKOLN gave a plenary on openess and the Web manager. Openness appears to be all the rage: open standards for interoperability, open source for software development and deployment, and open content for sharing knowledge. What brings these phenomena together is a commitment to openness. But how do colleges and universities engage with openness? And more particularly, what does it mean for institutional Web managers.

Ranjit Sidhu from Nedstat gave a talk about how after discussions with various people in the education sector it became clear that there was a requirement for some industry wide statistics about Web site activity. These Sector Statistics will provide organisations, specifically universities, with a means of benchmarking the performance of their Web site.

Kate Forbes-Pitt, Systems Manager, Web Services, London School of Economics will talk about aims aims to problematise the document, asking the following questions: what is a document? How does it impart information to its reader? Can it be replicated on screen? It proposes answers using the arguments of Hughes and King (1993) who contend that the document is a layered social artifact that exists to 'wrap' content. This 'wrapping' provides the reader with the knowledge they need in order to apply social rules to their reading of the document, and so become able to interpret its content. Some information systems writers argue that the need for social knowledge in a task negates the possibility of its automation. Following the logic of this argument, delivering a document (a container of rule) through the existing set of social rules that govern Web interaction, means that the full function of the electronically reproduced document becomes masked or confused. At best this makes the role of the document superfluous to its content, making the content difficult to interpret. At worst it makes the content incomprehensible to the user. This raises a further question: what purpose is served by reproducing documents online? Following from the above arguments, it is possible to argue that 'pure' content, rather than the imitation of printed paper, is likely to be a more successful way of imparting information through the Web.

Universities undertake research through a mesh of partnerships, collaborations and contractual relationships. Major research funding bodies, such as government departments, are increasingly encouraging their contractors to adopt formal quality assurance standards - such as ISO 9001:2000. If you haven't come across this already, you are likely to see it very soon! In this talk John Gilbey, Institute QA Manager, IGER discussed the impact of quality standards on the way Web resources - internal and external - are defined, delivered, managed and reviewed in academic environments. An over-view of the quality requirement is presented, along with some pragmatic suggestions to help you deal with it.

Michael Webb, IT and Media Services Head, University of Wales, Newport gave a talk about how Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way our staff and students (potential, current and past) relate to one another and our Universities. Embracing these technologies provides a great opportunity to enhance the University experience, but also presents a number of risks and challenges. So how do Universities develop a strategic approach to embracing Web 2.0?

Chris Scott from Headscape gave a talk on "Real World Emerging Technologies". Falling University entries and top-up fees have contributed to a step-change in the operational environment for the HE sector. This change has resulted in an acute pressure on institutions to innovate for success. This presentation will explore some opportunities for institutions to capitalise on new and emerging web technologies in response to such changes. While there is much hype about Web 2.0, there are some genuine opportunities for straightforward applications of Web 2.0 technologies in institutions that are low risk and low cost, and have potential for significant returns if they are introduced and managed correctly and the right people are involved.

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings

Assembly Chamber, Parliament Buildings