Advancements in information and communication technology have, for the first time in human history, enabled a host of opportunities that have seen societies leapfrogging out of underdevelopment, artists and creators regaining control over their expressions and people around the world working on distributed projects that benefit all humankind.

The iSummit offers a picture of that promise - bringing together activists, change agents and new world social entrepreneurs to chart and reflect on a positive path for a more fair, more just, more creative world in the Information Age.

The first iSummit took place at Harvard University, in July 2005, where about 80 people from every continent met to discuss the future of the Creative Commons International project - a project that saw volunteer lawyers porting the Creative Commons copyright licences to their national jurisdictions in order to promote the growth of a legal commons of culture and knowledge that would be free for the world to learn and innovate from.

The year after that, the iSummit was opened to a public of activists, artists, entrepreneurs and academics from 60 countries who met in Rio de Janeiro to help build the vision of a free digital culture in which creators are able to use the potential of digital technologies to advance human knowledge and understanding for the good of all. Ministers of Culture from Brazil and Chile, Gilberto Gil and Paulina Urrutia, applauded the movement for its focus on enabling creative industries and fostering global cultural dialogue, and the event drew publicity from the New York Times and a host of local and international press.

Last year, the iSummit moved to Dubrovnik, the beautiful seaside town with the age-old motto 'Libertas', where over 300 people met to chart a new course for the global commons in the next decade. The goal? To retain in the architecture of the Internet an equality of opportunity for all human beings to be able to learn and create using the medium, and to build the innovative potential of the Internet for both developed and developing nations. In this seminal event, Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks inspired participants with a new vision of distributed social and economic production that is not driven by faceless hierarchies, but among peers; open education activists began to chart a course for global action to scale up the move towards opening and reinvigorating educational policy and practice in schools, universities and informal learning environments everywhere; and the entire iSummit was simulcast into the virtual world of Second Life, where an additional 550 people attended the virtual sessions.

This year, the world's greatest icons of a free digital culture once again gathered to celebrate a global digital vision for the future. Unique to this year's event was the very special lead-up to the iSummit that brought iCommons together with the City of Sapporo, Digital Garage and Creative Commons Japan to deliver an event that had impact beyond August 1, 2008. In this sense, the iSummit was only the pinnacle of a series of events, meetings, workshops, activism and sharing that had been going on since August, 2007. This was a rare public-private partnership in the realm of the digital commons that did not come without its own challenges, but which made the process all the more grounded in the reality of creative industry, public duty and non-profit sustainability in both South Africa (where iCommons is based) and in Japan.

In this sense, then, we succeeded in sharing the knowledge and understanding of the digital commons on a global scale - and are excited that the event itself was all the more rich and effective because of this fact.

Kampai to Sapporo!   

Pics: CC Summit '05 picnicking, by , CC BY-NC 2.0, Larry Lessig opening the iSummit 06 in Rio, by CC BY-SA 2.0 and socialising at the iSummit 07 in Dubrovnik, by CC BY-SA 2.0, iSummit '08 with Jimmy Wales, by , CC BY 2.0