The iCommons Summit 2008 will be held at the Sapporo Convention Center.

The Convention Center was opened in 2003 and was built to accommodate a full range of events from meetings to exhibitions. This building was designed as an optimal user-friendly space for participants, and showcases the natural surroundings of Sapporo to their best advantage. It will certainly suit the interactive iCommons Summit programme, which will offer different modes of participation during the three-day event.

To serve the needs of our tech-savvy summit participants, the Convention Center offers excellent, high-speed Internet access. Other features include the breath-taking conference hall, inspired by scenes of falling snow that symbolises Sapporo's location in the northern part of Japan, the serene wood-panelled meeting rooms and the large outdoor exhibition space and gardens.

The conference hall

The 700-seater conference hall will be used as the venue for the keynote sessions in the morning and afternoon slots, as well as for the Academy track. This hall is well equipped with simultaneous translation booths and seats with receivers, which will make it the Japanese-English translation hub for the duration of the event.

The restaurant

The restaurant will be the setting for the Free Culture house, which will open from 11:00 to 15:30 every day during the event.

Surrounded by glass windows with a view of the gardens, this light-filled room will be a general chill-out area featuring live DJs, traditional calligraphy lessons, and a coffee bar.

The theatre

This wood-panelled room features a 180-inch screen, as well as simultaneous interpretation booths, which makes it perfect for showing movies.

Seating 200 people, the Creative Commons International legal day will take place in this room on 29 July and it will also host the DIY Video Lab.

Meeting rooms

There will be a host of smaller rooms with capacity ranging from 20 to 170 people, where parallel sessions and workshops will take place within the lab times.

A variety of these rooms will also be made available for spontaneous meetings that may arise between like-minded Commoners.

Pics: Exterior of the Convention Centre by hfordsa on flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0, main hall by Joi on flickr.com, CC BY 2.0,, restaurant by hfordsa on flickr.com CC BY-SA 2.0,, theatre by, yasuyuki matsushima on flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, and meeting room by hfordsa on flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0