iCommons, the international non-profit organisation working on building the Internet as a tool for development and change, launched ‘The Innovation Series’ in 
association with ITWeb on 13 November.

The Innovation Series is a series of events 
featuring speakers from around the globe who have had a significant positive influence on the world of the Internet. By bringing them to South Africa to talk about their success, iCommons and ITWeb hope to inspire a new generation of local businesses, organisations and communities to 
use the Internet to advance the 
way that we think of media, communication and culture in 
the digital age.

According to iCommons Executive Director, Heather Ford, “The Innovation Series is a unique partnership 
between the non-profit and new media sector in South Africa. Working with ITWeb and Media Partners, Mindshift and the Mail & Guardian Online, we believe that we can have a major 
impact on encouraging the development of the Internet as a tool for innovation and development.�

The first guest speaker of the 
Innovation Series was Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, who was named by Time magazine last year as one of the top most influential people in the world and by Forbes magazine as twelfth in its first annual “The Web Celebs 25“.

Wales spoke about Wikipedia 
and the launch of the African 
Wikipedias that will move us one step closer to Wales’ greatest goal: “to 
create and distribute a free 
encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language�. He will also talk about his latest venture, Wikia, which aims to take the 
powerful principles that have informed Wikipedia’s success and apply these 
to create potentially profitable 
business models. It’s a bold step 
that has captured the attention of pioneers within both the online and corporate worlds.

Other Innovation Series speakers include virtual worlds visionary Cory Ondrejka, Chief Technology Officer of Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, who will be speaking at the 
Innovation Series in March 2008.

Second Life is the Internet-based 3D virtual world where ‘residents’ interact, socialise, participate in 
activities, buy and sell services, 
property or goods. Real world 
companies, organisations and 
educational institutions have adopted Second Life as a medium for 
communicating with, and accessing a vast new user base: enter the digital world to find a Reuters news agency, Maldives and Swedish embassies, a virtual representation of the Louvre, and the online classrooms of a host of universities including Harvard and Stanford, and many more.

Ondrejka leads the team developing Second Life, which has created the revolutionary technologies required to enable collaborative, atomistic creation, distributed physical 
simulation, 3D streaming and 
completely customisable avatars, amongst many other applications. He has also been influential in Second Life’s intellectual property and virtual real estate policies.

By presenting speakers like Wales and Ondrejka, the Innovation 
Series has launched a platform for the exchange of ideas, with the vision that South African leaders in global digital technology arena can further harness the power of the Internet for positive change.

Download the press pack from the 13 November event (1.4MB)

For more information contact phone (011) 327 3155 or email innovation@icommons.org

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Picture of Jimmy Wales (above) by Chrys on flickr.com, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.