Today I'm taking off for a trip to the United Arab Emirates and India. I'm traveling with a good friend and we'll be Couch Surfing the whole time. Last year I took a similar trip to go to Education Without Borders in Dubai followed by a short trip to Mumbai. This year, there's no conference to attend and I'll be staying offline as much as possible. While I'm traveling I'll be thinking about things like the upcoming NYC Creative Commons Salon and TEDxNYED along with preparing to run my Peer 2 Peer University course 'Mashing Up the Open Web'.

You can keep up with my travels on Dopplr.

This post is long overdue (September 2008); I just found it sitting in my blog's queue. I had been trying to polish it off and must have forgotten about it, sorry for the delay.

Thanks to the generous support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation I was able to travel from Hong Kong to Logan, UT for the Open Education 2008 conference.

I started off the trip with a layover in Seoul that I extended for a couple of days. While I was there I saw a Korea vs. Japan football match, went to the Korea Traditional Performing Arts Festival, and ate a live octopus. Suffice it to say that South Korea was an adventure of it's own.

I flew into Salt Lake City, UT where I was met by my amazing Couch Surfing host Anthony. He chauffeured me from SLC airport to his place in Logan. For the next three days I sat in on a ton of sessions, met great people, and shared my ideas for what I was calling "uOpenEd".

If you read my application to OpenEd 2008 (linked below), you'll see my reasons for attending and my goals for "uOpenEd". Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had these kinds of thoughts and on the final day of the conference, I sat in on a session entitled "The Peer 2 Peer University: Moving Forward". This session was different from all the rest. Rather than someone delivering a lecture, we had a brief intro and broke off into groups to discuss and solve problems. That was the icing on the cake, it was exactly what I was looking for, a team to work with to turn the idea into a reality.

The P2PU session was lead by Philipp Schmidt & Stian Haklev. Coincidentally, I had been emailing back and fourth with Philipp about Open Everything before the conference, and had no idea that we'd bump into each other (and end up working on the P2PU project together).

As per Stian's suggestion, I've posted my OpenEd 2008 Scholarship Application along with the Conference Proceedings, 86MB (zip).

I've spent the last week decompressing my brain from organizing this year's Open Everything Hong Kong, so I apologize for the delay in posting this recap story.

First of all, the event was a huge success! Thank you all for your support and for making the day worthwhile. We had a great turnout, around 45 people came by with just over 30 in attendance at any given time. In the week leading up to the event the number of registered attendees almost tripled (to 62 registered attendees)! The speedy increase in numbers had me worried about space, but in the end the venue was just the right size.

I kicked off the event at 10AM with a short history of Open Everything and a quick look at the agenda (slides [PDF]). We then proceeded with short introductions by attendees and a talk by Haggen So from Creative Commons Hong Kong.

The rest of the day was left in the hands of attendees who organized some great Open Sessions.

Open Sessions:

• Creative Commons Hong Kong
• Flickr
• Guilt in Open Organizations
• HK Drupal User Group
• How to Encourage Open Organizations (and Society)
• Open Feedback and Retrospectives
• Open Government
• Open Hardware (AKA - How We May Build Our Own Toys)
• Open House: Internet Mediated Hospitality Exchange
• Open Public Information
• Openness and Mental Health
• Peer2Peer University

Note: Audio & Video recordings along with summaries and reactions are available on the Event Wiki.

We wrapped up the official event with an excellent presentation by John Bacon-Shone from Hong Kong University entitled Open Access to Research Publications & Data followed by a video handover to Open Everything Berlin.

After cleaning up the venue a number of us made our way to Lan Kwai Fong for some dinner and drinks at Whiskey Priest.