The 8th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (“AoIR”) has just wrapped up in Vancouver. It was, by all accounts, an enormous success, despite the heavy rain that kept people indoors.

Sponsored in part by Simon Fraser University, University of Washington, and the University of Southern California, as well as Microsoft Research, Linden Labs, and Joi Ito Lab, the conference ran from October 17 to 20th at SFU’s downtown campus.

Over 300 delegates from 29 countries participated, and over 240 papers were presented in up to 9 parallel sessions on the 3 main conference days (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday). Keynote speakers included John Lester (LindenLabs, Boston), Henry Jenkins (MIT) and John Willinsky (Stanford).

The School of Communication at SFU was well represented, with seven graduate students presenting papers (Sara Grimes, Florence Chee, Michael Felczak, Roy Bendor, Anil Narine, Mirjam Gollmitzer, Jean Hebert, and Nils Olson) with two additional grad students – Meera Nair and Nina Boulos – participating in the pre-conference workshops.

In addition to presenting papers, many students volunteered: Florence, Michael, Roy, and Jean – already mentioned – also did heroic volunteering. Brad King and Kate Milberry, both PhD students, helped out at the registration table, the book display and filling the conference tote bags. Karen Fung, an honours student, and Ashley Pullman, an undergrad, helped with registration as well. In fact, Karen did the scheduling of all of the volunteers and took on more shifts at the registration table than just about anyone else.

Two faculty members, Dal Yong Jin and Peter Chow-White, presented papers, and Stuart Poyntz provided the introductory remarks for Henry Jenkins’ keynote address. Andrew Feenberg, although not officially able to attend, did manage to come to the reception and a few other events and network with his many internet research colleagues from around the world.

The conference chair, Richard Smith, reports that the Vancouver event returned a healthy surplus to the association for use in future conferences which will be used to support graduate student and developing country participation.

The next conference will be held in Copenhagen, in October of 2008.

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Posted: Sunday, October 21st, 2007 @ 1:42 pm
Categories: Related.
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