The iCommons Summit planning workshop was held in Johannesburg on 17 and 18 January. Representatives from CC Japan, Sapporo city, Digital Garage, Second Life, the Summit 07 education track, and the iCommons board attended the event to discuss the Summit programme and organisation. See the full list of participants here, as well as the goals for the workshop.

We kicked off the event with a sugar-induced frenzy involving building 3D models of our dream iCommons Summit venues. This allowed us to identify a framework for how we could structure the programme, based on the activities and spaces suggested by the workshop participants. Watch the Youtube video by Fumi Yamazaki, showing the presentations of all the structures built by the participants. We also brainstormed around our Summit audience, our goals and suggested tracks or themes for the summit.

On day two we had to come back to reality. The CC
Japan, Sapporo city and Digital Garage representatives gave presentations on the actual Summit venue (the Sapporo Convention Centre) and told us more about the Japanese cultural, linguistic, legal and funding landscape in order to give us a better frame of reference about the city in which the iSummit will take place.

We then chatted and problem-solved around topics such as facilitation, translation, documentation of the event, the structure of the programme and much more. Full notes on these discussions can be found here, and audio clips can be found here.

We ended off the workshop on a practical note, by identifying 'to do' lists for each of these categories, and publicly committed ourselves to undertaking some of these tasks. Find out what we need to have done, here, and if you're interested, feel free to volunteer to help in preparing for the summit here.