Call for Participation

O'Reilly & Associates is pleased to announce its second Peer-to-Peer and Web Services conference, an event exploring the technical, business, and legal dimensions of the fast-growing Peer-to-Peer and Web Services spaces. The conference will be held September 18-21, 2001 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, D.C.

The recent furor over Peer-to-Peer file sharing with Napster and other music-sharing programs masks a deeper revolution, with new applications that are reshaping our PCs and our online interactions with each other. We're moving from strong client-server architecture to one in which applications connect user-to-user, device-to-device, service-to-service, and program-to-program in distributed networks. Some of the emerging realms include:

• General Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure
• Collaboration
• Distributed Computation
• File-Sharing
• Web-Services (XML-RPC, SOAP)
• Resource Discovery (WSDL, UDDI)
• Instant Messaging as Application Platform
• Device-to-Device Peer Architectures
• Metadata Services and Repositories
• Standards
• Security

Registration

Registration will open in Summer 2001. Please notify me when registration opens:

Participation

Individuals and companies interested in making presentations, giving a tutorial, or participating in panel discussions are invited to submit proposals.

Because the Peer-to-Peer and Web Services spaces are still relatively unformed, we're casting the net widely. Any innovative application that harnesses the power of distributed computers, users, services, or devices, and the technical, business, or legal issues raised by such applications, are appropriate subjects for this conference.

While the conference will consist of various tracks informed by the subject matter of the submissions, presentations are expected to lean more toward the technical or business/legal side. Technical presentations should be of interest to developers and administrators of Internet applications and infrastructure. Business/legal focused presentations should appeal to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, technical strategists, lawmakers and law-breakers.

Proposed talks should be 20, 30, or 60 minutes long. If you are interested in participating in or moderating panel discussions or otherwise contributing to the conference, please do make this known along with your preferred technical or business slant. If you have an idea for a particularly provocative group of panelists that you'd love to see square off, feel free to send in your suggestions.

Topics

• Infrastructure: architectures, scaling, management, security
• Distributed computation
• Peer-to-peer search methodologies and discovery services
• Instant messaging as a platform for practical groupware applications
• Dealing with firewalls, NATs, and other blocks to P2P applications
• Metadata: infrastructures, standards, management, routing, aggregation
• Interoperability of P2P protocols and systems
• The relationship between P2P and web services; applications which bridge these two realms
• Technical descriptions of novel P2P, distributed computation, or web services applications

• Specific applications of P2P technology, focusing on the business opportunity
• Real-world business applications for distributed computation (bioinformatics, financial modeling, etc.)
• P2P methods for copyright compliance/settlement systems
• Business models for leveraging P2P rather than fighting it
• P2P legal issues: patents, copyright, freedom, privacy, censorship
• Lessons from the history of P2P on the Net: Usenet, Email, routing
• Governance of P2P communities
• Business cases for offering Web services

Proposals

• Title
• Length: 20, 30, or 60 minutes
• Focus of Talk: Technical, Business, Legal, Tutorial
• Subject Area: File-Sharing; Distributed Computation; Overall Infrastructure; Search, Discovery and Metadata; Web-Services
• Abstract (maximum of 250 words)
• Description: a 50-75 word description for use in conference promotional materials
• Speaker Name
• Speaker Biography (maximum of 100 words)
• URL of Photograph (high-resolution JPEG format)
• Complete Speaker Contact Information: Address, Telephone, Email, URL

Proposal Submission

• Your Last Name: Proposal Focus (Technical, Business, Legal, Tutorial): Proposal Title
• For example: Smith: Technical: An Infrastructure for...

Important Dates

Exhibition and Sponsorship