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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.

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

Uganda, the first African country to have more mobiles than fixed telephones, is cited as an example of cultural and economic transformation. Penetration has risen from 0.2% in 1995 to 23% in 2008, with operators making huge investments in infrastructure, particularly in rural areas. Given their low incomes, only about a quarter of Ugandans have a mobile subscription, but street vendors offer mobile access on a per-call basis. They also invite those without access to electricity to charge their phones using car batteries.Popular mobile services include money transfers, allowing people without bank accounts to send money by text message. Many farmers use mobiles to trade and check market prices.

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.

What are the limits of political protest in cyberspace, where the boundaries between public and private space are murky? How far can activists go without infringing on the rights of the people against whom they are protesting? As international reliance on computer technology increases, can anyone with a little technical know-how declare their own war?

'In cyberspace, you don't have clear public byways intersecting private spaces, so there is no place to camp out and play your First Amendment card. If you try to deny service to someone else, by whatever means you use, you could be in pretty big trouble.'' The FBI spokesperson said that the use of Floodnet could constitute a federal crime: It is illegal to intentionally block access to an Internet server. But the members of the collective argue that they are simply gathering at the gateway, not chaining themselves to the door.

How could you survive without the media, the internet and a mobile phone for 24 hours?

I didn't expect it, but being deprived of the media for 24 hours resulted in my day-to-day activities becoming so much harder to carry out than usual.

Leinster made one of the first descriptions of a personal computer (called a "logic") in science fiction

Leinster envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and even commerce

Information runs rampant as every logic worldwide crunches away at problems too vast in scope for human minds to have attempted. Societal chaos quickly ensues, the situation became critical.

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.