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Mutual respect, trust, and recognition that cultural differences exist, matter, and must be explicitly dealt with are requirements of successful international projects. In summary, I would suggest these principles for the success of international collaboration: * Two (or more) teams share the same goal and seek the overall optimal result, not the local optimum. * Each team should clearly recognize and value the other party's different culture and traditions. * The single most important word in international projects is trust. Team members earn trust by being sincere, honest, and open-minded.

On the occasion of the celebration of the International Year of Planet Earth in (2008), the Department of Geography of the University of the Aegean in Lesvos, Greece, is organizing the international conference "Studying, Modeling and Sense Making of Planet Earth". The UNESCO Natural Sciences Sector has granted support to the conference.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) will integrate regional clean energy progress into a coordinated, global effort. It will provide political recommendations and identify funding for renewable technologies. Moreover, IRENA will seek to even the playing field for countries that have had difficulty affording investment in renewable energy. To this end, the agency will fund its budget with contributions by member-countries on a sliding scale with unindustrialized countries paying less.

I have the pleasure to announce that the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) has been born. (1YGF) Formally established in Trento, Italy in April 2009, after an open meeting at the FOIS 2008 conference, IAOA is a non-profit, open association with the purpose of promoting interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information systems development, library and information science, scientific research and semantic technologies in general.

Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'08) The power of narration and imagination in technology enhanced learning, September 16, 2008

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent international conflicts, promote post-conflict stability and development, and increase conflict management capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide.

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

An international research consortium has been formed to create the most detailed and medically useful picture to date of human genetic variation. The 1000 Genomes Project will involve sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world. The project will receive major support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, the Beijing Genomics Institute Shenzhen in China and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

s Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information. In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why.

PLoS Computational Biology is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal featuring works of exceptional significance that further our understanding of living systems at all scales through the application of computational methods. It is the official journal of the International Society for Computational Biology.

The World Federation of UN Associations is an independent, non-governmental organization with Category One Consultative Status at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and consultative or liaison links with many other UN organizations and agencies. The Millennium Project functions under the auspices of WFUNA. The Millennium Project of WFUNA is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Future Scenarios for Africa, Lessons of History, Environmental Security, Applications of Futures Research to Policy, and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography.

MarkMail is a free service for searching mailing list archives, with huge advantages over traditional search engines. It is powered by MarkLogic Server: Each email is stored internally as an XML document, and accessed using XQuery. All searches, faceted navigation, analytic calculations, and HTML page renderings are performed by a small MarkLogic Server cluster running against millions of messages.

Corrib.org is a cluster project, has been started on the base of cooperation between DERI International and Gdansk University of Technology. So far, it gathers together both open source projects being developed based on that cooperations and people affiliated to different sites.

Appropedia is the site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development. Appropedia helps us sustain our world.

The Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) is a computer-readable format for representing models of biochemical reaction networks in software. It's applicable to models of metabolism, cell-signaling, and many others. SBML has been evolving since mid-2000 thanks to an international community of software developers and users. This website is the portal for the global SBML development effort; here you can find information about all aspects of SBML.

This talk is an essay on design. In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne invented a new genre of writing he called an essai, which in modern French translates to attempt. Since then, the best essays have been explorations by an author of a topic or question, perhaps or probably without a definitive conclusion. Certainly in a good essay there can be no theme or conclusion stated at the outset, repeated several times, and supported throughout, because a true essay takes the reader on the journey of discovery that the author has or is experiencing. This essay-on design-is based on my reflections on work I've done over the past 3 years. Some of that work has been on looking at what constitutes an "ultra large scale software system" and some on researching how to keep a software system operating in the face of internal and external errors and unexpected conditions.

Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE08), Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17, 2008.

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Intelligent Support for Exploratory Environments held in conjunction with the EC-TEL'08 Conference Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17th, 2008.

The Yahoo! BOSS API allows you to access the Yahoo! search index with new levels of freedom. You can rearrange the results, change their look, have unlimited requests, mash the results with other resources, and you don't even have to let people know that Yahoo! is powering the page. Many people are busy mashing the BOSS results with internal data sets, proprietary logic, and new visual interfaces.

The global spread of the H5N1 avian influenza has already extensively damaged economies worldwide and food security in developing countries. The spread of infection to new ecosystems results in viral adaptation to new hosts, including humans, which inevitably amplifies the potential for pandemic flu. H5N1 represents an unprecedented model of how influenza infections may become widespread. It is recognized that avian influenza viruses may be the progenitors of the next human pandemic virus, and for this reason their genetic evolution should be monitored and investigated in a timely manner. The full support of the international scientific community is therefore urgently required to better understand the spread and evolution of the virus, and the determinants of its transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans. This in turn demands that scientists with different fields of expertise have full access to comprehensive genetic sequence, clinical, and epidemiological data from both animal and human virus isolates.