Chinese Internet Research Conference - in person, and online

Day 2 of the Chinese Internet Research Conference is now underway. So far so good. Putting this thing together has been a lot of work, and there are always a few complainers, but overall the feedback has been very positive: people feel they're learning things and getting ideas that they've not gotten elsewhere.

This is primarily an academic conference, so it's different in tone and focus to most industry/commercial internet conferences or grassroots blogger conferences. The core of the conference is to give academics who conduct research on the Chinese Internet an opportunity to share and discuss their findings.

The CIRC conferences are held in a different university each year. (I blogged CIRC05 here and here; and CIRC06 here). This year we've done our best to connect the academic research with perspectives of non-academic "practitioners" (as people who work in the "real world" are called in the academy): bloggers, journalists, businesspeople, and politicians. So we have included several "roundtable" panels to bring those perspectives into the mix.

We're also fortunate to have Dave Lyons and John Kennedy blogging all the presentations on the CIRC blog. Other great conference-blogging can be found on the WSJ China blog (here, here, and here so far) and CNReviews (here, here, and here). Also see the CIRC2008 Twitter feed.

There's no point in my duplicating their hard work, but I will plan to post some overviews of what I learned from this conference when it's all over.

Comments

[mahathir_fan]

Censorship imprisons the mind.

Any news on those law suits brought on by Chinese internet users to break up censorship?

[Carolyn]

I need information on other "Internet" or "online" conferences in China. Anyone know of a good resource?