Industry leaders, Academics, IT Professionals, hospital and health care administrators and government officials will peer into the future of software innovation at a groundbreaking conference on open source peer-production models from May 9 to 11 at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall, 31 King's College Circle, Toronto, Canada.

The conference, Open Source and Free Software: Concepts, Controversies, and Solutions, will debate the future of open source models of development in software and beyond, addressing how this movement will affect the way we work, learn and stay healthy. Open source, a way of producing and sharing computer code freely between industry, government and developers, has achieved widespread success in many areas of information technology. The conference will look at the growth of open source methods and ideas in several institutions. Panelists will discuss current legal issues, public policy concerns and business models as well as technological issues, uses in health care and its current and future role in education via concepts of open content and open access.

Among the 30 confirmed speakers for the event are Robert Young, founder of Red Hat, the world's largest commercial Linux distributor; Brian Behlendorf, Apache, co-founder; Steve Weber, author, political scientist at University of California at Berkley; David McGowan, Professor, University of Minnesota Law School and Dr. Yuri Quintana, creator of Cure4kids, a developing world-oriented pediatric support network.

The conference is organized by UofT's Knowledge Media Design Institute(KMDI).
For more information, please visit the conference website at: http://osconf.kmdi.utoronto.ca or the KMDI home page: http://kmdi.utoronto.ca/

The Knowledge Media Design Institute is a research community of over 60 University of Toronto faculty involved in the design use and evaluation of digital media that support human communications and learning. Members come from 25 different disciplines including computer science, sociology, engineering,
law, political science, medicine education and architecture.

Contact
Bernie Hogan, Publicity Chair
416-898-7630
Bernie.Hogan@utoronto.ca

Kelly Rankin, Conference Coordinator
416-946-8512
Kelly@kmdi.utoronto.ca