Roni Linser has is currently working away on getting the fifth League of Worlds conference to happen. It is scheduled to take place in Hong Kong in October.

We have always tried to make the League of Worlds conferences into participatory events, where people meet and collaborate, and actually do stuff. Because of this we have tried to move away from the standard conference format of abstracts, followed by submission of paper, followed by standing up reading the paper to a group of people who could more profitably have read it themselves.

In the past we have published all the papers in advance, and then had roundtable sessions where people come together to discuss the issues raised in the papers and (hopefully) propose projects and collaborations that might arise out of this.

This format has raised some eyebrows here and there. Recently though Ralf Appelt pointed me towards the idea of barcamps, which have their own web site and their own online rules. This has the great merit of providing a reference point for what we have been doing, and thus making it intelligible to those who might fund our journeys to Hong Kong.

I have mentioned this to Roni, and he is thinking about it.