The deadline for submitting papers for the Emory Conference on the Free Culture and the Digital Library is this Friday. Among the list of contributors who are hard at work writing and polishing submissions one can find a few names which will be familiar to readers of this bulletin:
This conference will offer people who are concerned about free access to information a chance to meet and exchange ideas. In particular, it will give those of us involved in projects like Planet Math, the Hyperreal Dictionary of Mathematics, and Asteroid Meta a chance to publicize these projects to a wider audience and benefit from interaction with like-mided individuals in other fields.
If you have a chance, please have a look at the essays and perhaps post comments and suggestions to their authors.
http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/Emory_Free_Culture_and_the_DL_Symposium
If you're curious about how to help out with the HDM project, we've got a short list of relatively "small" projects going here. "Small" doesn't necessarily mean easy or short term; some of these things could be tasks for a weekend, others could be tasks for a thesis project.
http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/Focused_HDM_subprojects
One of the weekend-sized tasks is sifting through the "related work" page that we've put together with some preliminary content.
http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/HDM-related_things_to_check_out
That is the subject under discussion on this page:
http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/Mechanically_structuring_readable_proofs
It would be interesting to get some additional views on the subject! (Probably every mathematician "knows" why their own work is important!)
Google has declined to fund our great applicants, and the HDM project continues to be a fly-by-night volunteer operation. Getting heavily involved with the project may not be an option for you, and helping us with funding may not be an option either. But please take the time to get acquainted with the project if you haven't done so already. More people should be aware of what we're trying to do here (even if they don't particularly care for it). We like friendly debate and constructive criticism.
http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/HDM
Note to all users (esp. new ones): check the Policy and so forth about bulletins. To sum up: sum up your activities for the historical and public record. Especially important since I'll be gone most of the week. --jcorneli
I was considering posting something about free