I am glad to say that JD Lasica (New Media Musings) will be leading one of the sessions at the upcoming Symposium for Social Architecture: How Will The Social Web Change Media? JD will do a great job, and is bringing together some great contributors for the session.

Chris Nolan (SpotOn -- note: new domain!), one of the most vocal leaders of the "stand alone journalism" movement, will be joining Jeff Jarvis and others in a session dedicated to what we can learn from the role the web does and does not play in disaster preparedness and response (A Case Study In Web-Based Civics: Katrina and Recovery 2.0).

The conference is shaping into something really fascinating. I spent sometime yesterday, at Blogon, chatting with Kaliya Hamlin, who will be joining me in my session (Is Business Ready For Social Software?). She suggested that we examine the asymmetries in relationships between individuals and businesses, and the likelihood that people will increasingly demand more symmetric relationships. As just one example, Kaliya maintains that people will want to retain information about their purchasing history, and not simply cede it to those businesses that we do business with. And, we may want to invert the normal course of business, based on this information. Imagine that I am traveling to San Francisco, and I could publish some version of my hotel rental history and interests through some as now unavailble solution (a mirror-image of eBay, perhaps?) that would allow hotels to publish bids to me for rooms. This general observation about increasing the symmetry in relationships through social technologies will be a springboard into related within-the-business topics, as well. I believe that social tools are inherently subversive, because they will disrupt established patterns of authority, and naturally push business toward acting as more democratic swarmocracies.

I spoke for a few moments with Mary Hodder, who will be leading a session as well: Engines of Meaning: How Will We Scale Our Understanding? I lifted the "engines of meaning" meme from Bruce Sterling:

Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they'll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won't be surfing with search engines any more. We'll be trawling with engines of meaning.

Mary and others will dig into this critical question: how will be make sense of the expanding blob of human discourse that makes up the Web?

For more information and registration for the Symposium, click here.