I recently returned from  a business trip to Europe where, among other things, I participated as a speaker at an online education conference in Prague.   The conference, which included attendees from leading universities and government agencies throughout Europe, was in many ways what you might expect:  interesting use cases, technical instruction, and shared anecdotes and experiences, including one presenter from a Ministry in the Czech Republic who conceded that it took three years longer to get permission to run cabling through his protected 450 year old building than it actually took to run the cable. 

But despite the familiarity of the conference format, there was one aspect of the event which struck me, as I sat in a conference hall in the center of Prague, as quite remarkable  - the openness with which the presenting organizations were sharing information, collaborating, and cooperating with other organizations across virtually every imaginable border.   I got to hear a detailed presentation by Dr. Jan Grutorad, whose CESNET organization now links more than 25 universities by a network designed predominantly for sharing research, lecture content, and communicating via video conferencing and streaming.   I also got hear about several multi-national projects, including anti-cancer research projects that are spanning across Europe and rich media management and search products that are comfortably pairing Europe's oldest universities with private technology companies. 

Maybe all of this information sharing isn't all that remarkable, but having been to Eastern Europe many times prior, my sense in the past was that despite an abundant enthusiasm for new ideas and openness, those ideas proved very difficult to act upon.    Now, nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, I had the pleasure of hearing how online communications is one of the ways that former Eastern Bloc countries are able to practice and benefit from the openness to which they had been entitled since 1989.