Invitation to participate in I Annotate 2014

To all Annotators (and other humans)!
 
We’d like to invite you to I Annotate 2014, April 3-6 in San Francisco.
http://iannotate.org/2014/
 
If you’d like to attend, please register now at http://register.iannotate.org/, all are welcome. 

Because of limitations of the venue, we have a hard cap at 125 attendees. If you’d like to present on your annotation-focused project or use-case, then just let us know by sending a short description to info@iannotate.org.
 
We’re looking forward to having you back.  So much has happened: New projects like edX’s annotation capability have launched, and the W3C is moving towards a working group for Open Annotation.  Annotator now has over 20 projects that are incorporating it into their products and services, and the overall enthusiasm and momentum for annotation both in the community and in the press has been remarkable.
 
Our goal in 2013 was to bring people together, showcase the range of technologies and projects working to make annotation a reality, and pair them with a selection of the most interesting use cases for annotation in science, government, law, journalism, religion, education and other areas.  We wanted to get those building tools alongside those that might use them.
 
This year, we’re expanding on the same approach.  We'll share successes, lessons learned, and roadmaps for the year ahead.  We’ll also hear about intriguing new applications for annotation that help stretch our imaginations of what it can be.  Particularly exciting this year are the first steps toward standardizing open annotations in a W3C Working Group.  They will be collocating their own workshop with ours, on April 2, in order to explore the next steps forward, soliciting feedback on what support is needed for the annotations ecosystem to thrive, and identifying what components and solutions already exist.
 
Our focus is on the Open part of open annotation-- namely annotation in its purest, most noble form: employed to further human knowledge, collaboration, open society, political freedom, and undertaken in the spirit of sharing, interoperability and bringing people together.  Our mutual objective is to ensure that the creation of a new layer over the web is done in the right way and for the right reasons.
 
We encourage you to join us-- and to participate.  We use a dual structure, with a mix of presentations and unconference time. For presentations, we’re seeking those that touch on annotation, including demonstrations of new applications, reports of substantial progress on existing efforts, incorporation of annotation into publications and platforms and novel use cases that allow old problems to be solved in new ways.
 
If you have coding skills, then come and work on a project of your own or dig in and help with someone else’s. During the conference, we’ll be running a hacker lounge, so if you’d like to break away for a bit with someone you’ve met and start making progress, you can do so on your own schedule. After the meeting, on Saturday and Sunday, there will be two more days at the same venue for developers to focus on projects together.
 
This year we’ve also spent considerably more attention to making sure that the wireless will be fast and glitch free by contracting for a dedicated line, and bringing in a professional group with experience at Fort Mason to manage it.
 
We’re doing all this because we believe open annotation is a unique new capability that has the potential to radically transform the Web and the way we use it-- in ways that empower each of us to extend our reach, communicating and sharing across the globe.
 
We hope to see you there.