Annual Report from the Director

Dear Friends;

It is hard to believe we are already in 2010 – and high time for me to provide our first annual report. 2009 has been an extraordinarily successful year for the Information + Innovation Policy Research Centre. We have grown by leaps and bounds.

A year ago we barely had one fellow. Today our roster of present and past doctoral and post-doctoral fellows include Tracy, Quihong, Kaitlyn, and Dima. In addition to their own research projects, they have joined important Centre projects on virtual worlds, search engines, domain names, and citation networks. Because of their creativity, dedication and energy we have an excellent set of papers in the pipeline that will employ cutting edge research to inform pressing policy questions of the global information economy. In less than a week, Zeenath will join us, and we continue to attract interest from very distinguished fellowship applicants around the world.

Yee Fen joined us in the summer as a visiting professor. A legal academic and computer scientist by training, she will focus her research on the law and governance of virtual worlds.

And with Cindy, our fledging centre now has an able and effective business manager!

Our lunch seminar series got off to a great start.

Distinguished speakers from around the globe spoke at the I+I Centre, including Professors Fairfield, Hetcher, Lastowka, and Hunter as part of our governance in virtual worlds series that explores how rules and norms evolve in these virtual environments that attract tens of millions of Internet users around the world.

We were honored to host Professor Milton Mueller, one of the preeminent minds on Internet governance, as well as Professor Trevor Pinch, who is a world-renowned leader in science and technology studies (STS).

Our Centre website went live in 2009, and has been attracting thousands of visitors from around the world every month.

Our Centre’s research was published in leading academic outlets, including in SCIENCE and by Princeton University Press (“Delete”) – and reported in print, broadcast and online media around the world: from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal to the Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, NPR, BBC, CBC (Canada), ABC (Australia), RAI (Italy) and RFI (France), all the way to the Singapore Straits Times and the Bangkok Post closer to home. It is a both humbling and energizing result!

We have also been able to attract leading academics from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, Syracuse, and St.Gallen (Switzerland) to join our international advisory board.

Only in a few days we’ll be hosting a distinguished group of global decision makers from business, government and academia to discuss the rise and governance of meta-information – an endeavor supported by Singapore’s IDA and MICA.

These achievements would not have been possible without the tireless, creative, and dedicated work of all my colleagues here at the Centre, the advice from the International Advisory Board, the support from the LKY School, the University, and the Singapore government, the collaboration with many Internet and information researchers around the world, and most of all your interest in our work.

With your continued help and support, we’ll aim to work even harder, go even further, and achieve even more in 2010!

Yours,

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger