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The summit focussed mainly on open data, open access and open knowledge, although there were a lot of interesting ideas, many of which we have since tried to incorporate here (such as microfinancing via flattr). To whet your appetite, here’s the opening discussion.

The spirit of these principles is that there should be transparency to the methods, observations, data collection, data access, communication, collaboration and research tools.  Instead of limiting the sharing of the practice of science to publication of selected results, the entire scientific process should be exposed to potential users, collaborators and extenders of the work.

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

These days one witty Tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video - forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse - can snowball and kill a product or damage a company's share price.

It's a dramatic shift in consumer power. But what if companies could harness this power and turn it to their advantage?

At the most basic, these tools measure the volume of social media chatter. Researchers at Hewlett Packard showed that they can accurately predict a Hollywood movie's box office takings by counting how often it is mentioned on Twitter before it opens.