www.johndbritton.com

Today I'm taking off for a trip to the United Arab Emirates and India. I'm traveling with a good friend and we'll be Couch Surfing the whole time. Last year I took a similar trip to go to Education Without Borders in Dubai followed by a short trip to Mumbai. This year, there's no conference to attend and I'll be staying offline as much as possible. While I'm traveling I'll be thinking about things like the upcoming NYC Creative Commons Salon and TEDxNYED along with preparing to run my Peer 2 Peer University course 'Mashing Up the Open Web'.

You can keep up with my travels on Dopplr.

Last year I organized a gathering in Beijing's Beihai Park for Couch Surfing Day 2008. This year we were featured in the Wanderlust Newsletter. Check it out!

I'd like to officially announce the Just Plane Fare Award. I'm now accepting applications from MMRHS students planning international travel during the summer of 2009. One winner will receive free round trip airfare to anywhere in the world to go and do something.

Why? Because I can. Because the students deserve it. Because others have done for me. Pay it forward.

Partially inspired by Sidharth (... Ben, Prashant, Neha & Co.) from Life Unlimited.

Read the full details for eligibility and restrictions.

This post is long overdue (September 2008); I just found it sitting in my blog's queue. I had been trying to polish it off and must have forgotten about it, sorry for the delay.

Thanks to the generous support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation I was able to travel from Hong Kong to Logan, UT for the Open Education 2008 conference.

I started off the trip with a layover in Seoul that I extended for a couple of days. While I was there I saw a Korea vs. Japan football match, went to the Korea Traditional Performing Arts Festival, and ate a live octopus. Suffice it to say that South Korea was an adventure of it's own.

I flew into Salt Lake City, UT where I was met by my amazing Couch Surfing host Anthony. He chauffeured me from SLC airport to his place in Logan. For the next three days I sat in on a ton of sessions, met great people, and shared my ideas for what I was calling "uOpenEd".

If you read my application to OpenEd 2008 (linked below), you'll see my reasons for attending and my goals for "uOpenEd". Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had these kinds of thoughts and on the final day of the conference, I sat in on a session entitled "The Peer 2 Peer University: Moving Forward". This session was different from all the rest. Rather than someone delivering a lecture, we had a brief intro and broke off into groups to discuss and solve problems. That was the icing on the cake, it was exactly what I was looking for, a team to work with to turn the idea into a reality.

The P2PU session was lead by Philipp Schmidt & Stian Haklev. Coincidentally, I had been emailing back and fourth with Philipp about Open Everything before the conference, and had no idea that we'd bump into each other (and end up working on the P2PU project together).

As per Stian's suggestion, I've posted my OpenEd 2008 Scholarship Application along with the Conference Proceedings, 86MB (zip).

I'm going to Drupalcon DC 2009! I managed to get my ticket at the early-bird price of $125, tickets are now $250 each.

I'm really looking forward to the trip. I've been to the capital of at least twenty other countries, but I've never actually seen Washington, DC. This will be a great opportunity for me to see my nation's capital city.

I'm planning to co-host a BoF session entitled "Guilt in Open Source Projects" with Dave from Advomatic. The session is a spin-off of a session I led at Open Everything Hong Kong, "Guilt in Open Organizations".