 We started the Monday morning with you up there outlining your vision and your understanding of the interaction between university and cyberspace. Now, since then we've heard many things in this room. We heard more optimistic scenarios, but also pessimistic one. We heard the notion that actually universities are likely to survive cyberspace and that maybe we overestimate the role that cyberspace will and actually shall play when it comes to universities. Would you revisit the vision from Monday morning or are you confirmed in your review based on the conversations of the last two days? That's my first question. Second one is easier. Joanne Carlos asked you whether what a benchmark of success would be for this conference and I was wondering whether you would say it was a successful conference. Based on the benchmark that you set or not? Well, first, I'll allow me to thank the wonderful participants not just here but all the way through the conference. I feel that the questions that I came in with I've matured with over the course of the conference. I feel that I've genuinely learned something while I've been here. It's felt like an integrating experience I have to say my orientation to this is in some way instrumental. My point of departure is cyberspace, our title universities and cyberspace. Cyberspace for me was the new terrain that the locale that I wanted to see a center grow in and extend thought in. And I was fascinated this morning to listen to Bruce Sterling and his history of the word and the way the word itself is actually now in contest. I have to say I've thought of cyberspace as everything we could reach on the net as a place that's divided in a sharp boundary between that which you can reach for free on the net and that which you have to pay for. So the public space that I've wanted to see thrive in internet is this free space that any student any user of the net can reach in terms of what they can gain from connecting with it and what the opportunity is to contribute to that free space. So the very first thing that I think I take away is that the very idea now of cyberspace is in contest in some way with Sterling suggesting that the forces that would like to dominate the internet from a security perspective enjoy that title because space is something you can occupy and defend and can attack and so forth. Well that though puts the question in context for me because from the beginning it struck me that internet as a free space a freely connected space was at once a kind of perhaps a last chance for humanity a human connection. Maybe not maybe that's too grand but at the same time a very delicate space a space that was created by university and yet the people the forces that came to see it as a tremendously generative space turned out predominantly at least so far to be the forces of commerce in corporatism and now the forces of security that Bruce points the way to and so my worry from the beginning was that the internet had no grounding institutionally in the power institutions of the world that would maintain it as an architecture that was open with a philosophy that was open against the forces of corporatism on the one hand and of government security on the other. And so my thought coming in was an instrumental thought university struck me as a base potentially a set of institutions in the world that have a set of commitments that are most internet friendly in the sense of the free space of the internet. Now just as cyberspace in the sense is contested universities obviously is contested too the idea of universities is almost as evanescent in the sense that we don't have universities with there's no email list of universities we hear 10,000 universities but we're incredibly disparate institutions all struggling in this wave of technology that is sweeping across and yes it's completely possible to orient yourself towards that new wave by denying its existence it's possible to orient by being afraid of it that it will simply wipe out university as it dissolves university functions in ever better distributed forms and so this social environment that Bruce so brilliantly I thought spoke to this this morning that is which in some sense has to be the core of university some locale where a social process takes place that that that comes comes into play the question is is it possible to reify those institutions in some self-conscious way so that universities see themselves as having some kind of mission and I think in light of our discussion again very helpful a mission that on the one hand recognizes all the social obligation of the university and yet there's something beyond that social obligation that has to do with commonality and I believe and feel that I I felt emerge a number of times in powerful ways during this conference the idea that universities in addition to their social mission with students and faculty and knowledge transmission and all of this they have a role because of their place in cyberspace there is cultural heritage which is vulnerable to be lost but is also in great need of being expressed and preserved and expanded upon so that for me the idea of university has at once a social set of dimensions and we can talk about the architecture and what makes it easier for digital natives to learn and so forth and so on but beyond that there is also a cultural dimension that is in in in the cyberspace which I feel as a rhetorical space a space of knowledge rather than things universities have a role of providing the place in that environment for the cultural heritage of their particular domain every university somehow has its own unique cultural grounding in the environment that it's in the student body it's in the ethnic environment it's in and the contribution of that to the free space so that instead of instead of thinking of cyberspace as we feel it now as basically a commercial space and a bunch of stuff you can buy and some public domain stuff from way way back if one imagine igniting the creative not actually I shouldn't say that if one imagine simply focusing the productive creative capacity of university on contributing to the public space that is actually integrating the process of contributing to wikipedia and like kinds of public enjoyments as productive function of university something students and faculty do as a part of the social enterprise of learning that for me would be the mark of success real success beyond simply the success of having an enjoyable time the the igniting of the creative force of university as a contributor to public space in such a way that the universities themselves see the self-interest in it see that this is the way for us to go this is our responsibility in this new environment to preserve our place in culture into the future so that would that would be my mark of success and of course that depends completely on the future I'm struck we are communion and we are speaking about university but we're not really speaking to university university isn't here we're really quite talking amongst ourselves in a way we would like the message of this conference somehow to refine itself to become an excellent argument to the the for the architecture of the argument for the place of university in cyberspace to become sufficiently clear so that it's a message that could be put out and put out in some way that the universities of the world actually form an audience and are given some opportunity to respond in a way that would make it real so that would be my mark of success