Upcoming deadlines:

The Sapporo City Sushi competition! Make sure you send in your new ideas for sushi recipes by this Friday the 16th of May. The Mayor of Sapporo will be awarding prizes for the Sushi Competition at the Mayor's Reception at the iSummit and some of the world's greatest sushi chefs will judging your creations. Be sure to watch the hilarious video linked from Sushi Contest - not for the Weak at Heart, to learn more about sushi and sushi eating. I've just thought of one myself: South African Bobotie Rolls - spiced mincemeat and egg rolls. Mmmmmm...

Programme submissions:

Thank you so much for the great submissions that you sent in for the iSummit. We received over 80 submissions!  

James Cairns, our programme coordinator, will send feedback to every submitter by Friday this week and we'll publish the first draft programme on the site next week. All I can say is that, if you thought the Education Track rocked last year, you'll really enjoy this year's Summit. The programme has a bit of everything - TED-style keynotes from some of the world's leaders in new thinking around digital culture and models for peer production and open innovation; parallel tracks related to open education, cultural industries and open business, research into new models of intellectual property policy and the analysis of the free culture movement, local digital publishing and public sector innovation and the Japanese digital culture movement; not to mention some great parties.

A reminder that the iSummit is primarily an event where we 'get things done' rather than just a talk shop. This means that you'll want to choose a track and stick with it the whole event if you're really going to get the most benefit. Each track has set itself some great collaborative outcomes and we're going to have a lot of fun working through the sessions until the final report-back by different track participants. So make sure you join up to the track lists soon and get to know people before so that you can really start working with ideas when you arrive in Sapporo.

Registration update:

The reason why we ask for all participants to pay a registration fee is so that we can cover some of the costs of putting on this exciting event and enable us to be able to help track volunteers to travel to the event. This year, we're trying to cover 25% of the costs of the event through registration, but we're still keeping the cost relatively lower than similar events to enable maximum participation. Just know that every Yen, Euro and Dollar paid for registration keeps this event on the map and enables us to get together once a year to do some really important work.

The deadline for early bird registration is only two days away, so make sure you register ASAP to get the benefit of this offer by registering and booking your accommodation at the conference hotel before 4pm GMT on 15 May.

That's it for this short update.

Arigato! (And if you don't know what that means, start learning your Japanese by watching this Youtube movie - Fumi Yamazaki shot this at the beautiful Moerenuma Park where we'll be having our excursion on 1 August).


Picture: Claudecf on flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0