Icommons.org

As the iSummiters ‘06 waved an ‘adeus’ edged with sadness to Rio, thoughts turned to Dubrovnik, to which our future hosts there issued an invitation at the final iSummit ‘06 session. The site of iSummit ‘07 a year from now ‘ an Adriatic Croatian gem ‘ is a ‘Renaissance City,’ I was told by one of the our hosts for ‘07. Renaissance has a nice resonance with the rebirth of culture and creative freedom in the emerging iCommons age. More information about next year will be available in coming weeks. For now we can contemplate a marvelous remixing of 13th century city ambiance and digital iCommons 21st century ideas.

We are proud to announce the launch of the iSummit Coverage website.

The content on this site is the result of a collaborative effort from the contributors, the Summit participants themselves, and the blogosphere in general - the perfect example of citizen journalism at it’s best, and a way to have a truly layered, multi-lingual, multi-angled view on the Commons event of the year.

Our blog also features RSS feeds for the blog posts and the podcasts.

Also check out our wiki, where we will feature speaker notes and working group notes, for your information on the progress of the plans and projects to be executed in the future.

Have a great read!

With iCommons enthusiasts descending upon Rio to attend the iSummit, a commons vibe is starting to fill the venue. But don’t feel left out if you can’t make it ‘ we are proud to announce the launch of the iSummit Coverage site, which will host a variety of media to keep you feeling as involved as possible.

The website will feature podcasts and multi-lingual blog entries written by our contributors, who are also participants at the Summit. We will have a live Flickr stream, with photos submitted by the (more…)

Ahead of the iCommons Summit at the end of this week, openDemocracy has organised an informative discussion and debate on their site, with writers covering issues around open content, free culture, the digital commons and for some, a useful article titled ‘iCommons for beginners’.

As stated on the site, “a rich and surprising fusion of word, sound and image is generating a new, transcultural creative space: the digital commons. It’s also free ‘ and that provokes opposition from those with legal, business or artistic interests in keeping culture under copyright.”

The discussion will be updated and expanded every day this week, until Friday 23rd. Also, join in the forum discussion, which asks the question: “Do you remix?”

Articles to be expected this week, include David Berry on the relationship between iCommons and political structures, Jane Portal on state-owned North Korean art and cultural copyright, and Sada Mire on the clash between copyright and cultural heritage and ownership in Ethiopia.

Riveting content and commons conversation - the perfect prelude to a promising event.

So says Jay Rosen in a column published today by the Washington Post. Rosen’s concluding illustration of the digital age storms that have rolled across traditional news media is Reuters’ tsunami woes:

On the day the Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Reuters had 2,300 journalists and 1,000 stringers positioned around the world, according to the firm’s chief executive, Tom Glocer. But none of them were on the beaches to witness the disaster, he told the Online Publishing Association.

The amateurs were there and they were prepared. “So for the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3 megapixel portable telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn’t have those pictures you weren’t on the story,” Glocer said. Reuters, a wire service, had to recognize there are more people in the press zone now — and integrate their material into its report. That should make us better, he said, but “you have to be open to both amateur and professional to tell the (more…)

The Public Library of Science has announced the launch later this year of PLoS ONE OPEN ACCESS 2.0. The new project homepage here states PLoS ONE will be:

A peer-reviewed publication that publishes all rigorously performed science
A vibrant online forum that encourages scientific dialogue and debate
A “hassle-free” process that gets your work online within weeks

Subsections of the homepage explain several ways in which PLoS ONE will be an iCommons builder. Among these mechanisms, my personal favorite is called ‘INCLUSIVE SCOPE, a publication for the (more…)

This article, by Frederick Noronha, is edited from the full version on the Asia Commons Conference website. Fred is the founder of www.bytesforall.org, the award-winning website on ICTs for South Asia and is a prolific blogger on ICT for development issues. He writes here about Michel Bauwens (p2pfoundation.net) who participated in Asia Commons in Bangkok this week.

Michel Bauwens, 48, turned his back on a senior corporate position, and moved from his homeland of Belgium to another continent… and a very different way of doing things.

Today, researching the P2P movement worldwide is a virtual obsession. Pun intended.

So what’s the idea behind Michel’s p2pfoundation.net and the 2,000 pages of (more…)

I have just been to ‘Asia Commons‘, an event organised by Bellanet and local partners and funded by the IDRC (International Development Research Centre) and the UNDP’s International Open Source Network (IOSN).

On the first day of the event, I joined Lawrence Liang (ccIndia) and Ronaldo Lemos (ccBrazil) to talk about the intellectual property challenges and solutions in Asia, South America and Africa respectively. Ronaldo Lemos spoke of the pioneering efforts by those who are experimenting with new ways of distributing knowledge and creativity in Brazil, while Lawrence Liang spoke about the ‘cultural flows’ represented by the piracy of films and music in Asia (Liang) and the need to move away from ‘knee-jerk media responses to piracy’.

Lawrence Liang’s assessment of piracy is well worth a read. You can find his article entitled ‘Media Empires and Renegade Pirates’ here.

I met some incredible Commons-builders at the Summit ‘ including Michel Bauwens, who has developed one of the most comprehensive directories of resources on ‘peer to peer sharing’ at (more…)

The webpage here on the official website of the FIFA World Cup Germany 2006 is the Portugues version of Classic Football. The same section can be accessed in eight other languages, as can the other features of this large and diverse website. In the ‘Classic Football’ pages all 17 previous World Cups are described. We learn that the earliest competition was held in 1934 in Uruguay. The Uruguayan team won, causing celebrations in Montevideo which went on for several days and nights and led to the proclaiming of 31 July as a national holiday.

Exploring the large network of this official website is not only a way to learn about the sport for which the world expresses great common enthusiasm. There is a lot to learn too about the 2006 state of the art of websites: this is a showcase and celebration of information presentation through digital media. There are multimedia, mobile media, dynamic media, digital games, and a very great deal of information. The official World Cup online is an colorful, exciting example and model for how to interface a global event that includes a lot of action and history.

In the June/July 2006 issue of Innovate, Howard Pitler writes about Creative Commons: A New Tool for Schools. The article outlines copyright issues from the perspective of teachers and students. It continues with an overview of Creative Commons and then an insightful discussion of benefits from bringing Creative Commons into the classroom.

In his section called Implications for Educators, Pitler gives several reasons why ‘Teachers and students should begin using this alternative to traditional copyright . . .’ Most compelling to me was how just exploring Creative Commons with students opens up to them the broad subject of ethical use of knowledge materials. On the practical side, Pitler adds, ‘. . . bringing Creative Commons to the classroom gives students and teachers a new tool for finding material that is both appropriate and legal to use and remix; Creative Commons allows an astonishing degree of access to interesting work.’ This is a basic essay for educators that I hope will be read and shared widely. (Innovate requires free registration.)