Icommons.org

Bring together student journalists, media studies lecturers, editors of major South African magazines and online newspapers. Add their collective, yet varied experiences from practicing in the field of media. Mix in a touch of good advice and helpful hints. Stir in a pinch of passion for the profession. Attach a Creative Commons (CC) license ‘ and viola - you have Jo’s Toolkit, a recently launched website which provides resources and tools for journalism students and grassroots/media practitioners in the fields of writing, editing, design, photography, television, radio and new media.

‘Jo’s Toolkit came about in the hope of educating other journalists. We have access to lecturers, students and professionals with a wealth of experience and media knowledge and we wanted to pool these resources and make them available to others,’ says Jo’s Toolkit founders and editors, Rhodes University journalism students Carly Ritz and Gregor Rohrig.

And access these resources, they certainly did. The site hosts articles from South African Mail and Guardian Online editor Matthew Buckland, Student Life managing editor, James Simpson and (more…)

The third Creative Commons Japan seminar held on 26 September welcomed a diverse range of panelists. Heather Ford from iCommons announced the new phase of the Creative Commons movement where open business, culture and education emerge as the new contexts of our era. Chiaki Hayashi, from Japan’s biggest creators network Loftwork, described how and why the very notion of openness is not only a virtue but also a vital engine to sustain communication between Loftwork’s 6 000 designers and illustrators. Tadashi Nakanishi from ClipLife, a Creative Commons licensed video sharing portal run by the ex-national telephone company NTT, explained their interest as Japan’s infrastructural ISP in contributing to the growth of cultural heritage and independent new media. Finally, Larry Lessig discussed his ideas on why “hording” cultural goods, using examples such as (more…)

On September 23rd, Association Wikimedia Poland (the Polish affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation) and Creative Commons Poland organised a party to celebrate the 5th birthday of Polish Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales was our guest of honour and gave a talk as part of the monthly Creative Commons Salon meeting. He talked about Wikipedia and his new project Wikia, about what an encyclopedia should be (”radical”), about the promise of freely accessible knowledge that Wikipedia brings and the model of community production promoted by Wikipedians. Free culture activists know these stories well. Wikipedia is a marvel, in an error-laden, permanently-under-construction (more…)

I’m at the New Context Conference in Tokyo produced by Digital Garage and superbly hosted by iCommons Chairman, Joi Ito. It’s been a fascinating event with insights into the future of Web 2.0 from the perspective of internet theorists and pioneers.

Yesterday I listened to Technorati Chief Technologist, Tantek Ã?elik talking about ‘microformats’. Technorati helps you find out what bloggers are saying about you - as you can see here with a search for iCommons on technorati.com.

Tantek defines microformats as ‘Small bits of (X)HTML that identify richer data types like people and events in your webpages’.

For me, the most exciting thing about his talk was that, for the first time, I truly understand the code behind the (more…)

Final preparation for Science Commons’ upcoming conference in Washington, DC is under way. The two-day, invitation-only event, hosted by the National Academies of Science, will kick off on Tuesday 3 October.

‘The Commons of Science’ conference will bring together over 45 scientists, leading policy makers and other commons advocates to discuss issues surrounding the free flow of scientific material. The Science Commons team (with the help of Jim Campbell and Harlan Onsrud from the University of Maine) hopes to open the lines of communication across disciplines to help further the existing vision for making scientific data more accessible.

The attendee list (found here) includes those from the scientific disciplines themselves (geospatial, archeology, biological sciences, anthropology etc.), as well as representatives from the (more…)

Soccer, referred to as ‘The Beautiful Game’, is an ideological phenomenon. Fans lose themselves in its euphoric dimensions, which span every intellectual configuration from superstition to virtual bookmaking. Rivalry is fierce, both on and off the field. Soccer’s canonical status as the most popular sport in the world is reaffirmed every four years on the occasion of the FIFA World Cup’¢. Nationalism is staked at fever pitch during the month it takes to determine a winner. In 2010, the honour of hosting this event will pass to South Africa.

The question beckons: at what price? New stadiums, for example, will topple a figure of (more…)

Big as a pumpkin, cherry-red and round, the sun hovers over the coastline. My hands glow. The water looks like gold. These Croatian sunsets must be laced with steroids or something! Glowing on the other side of the waterway in a lego-like grandeur are Dubrovnik’s old city-walls.

I’m filming a video documentary about music in Croatia to show at next year’s iCommons Summit. Since I have spent some time filming in this magical place, I wanted to report on the sights and sounds of Croatia, ahead of the next iCommons Summit to be held in Dubrovnik, in June 2007.

Croatia is the small r-shaped country at the northern end of the (more…)

Applying a Creative Commons licence to works has become second nature to thousands of creators around the world. But for many writers, musicians, artists and researchers, proving authorship and when the work was licensed, is less easy ‘ especially if they are first time or inexperienced CC users. In the wild frontiers of the internet, it’s still relatively easy to claim a piece of work as your own. And while a return to restrictive, hands-up-or-I’ll-shoot copyright is not something anyone wants, there is still the question of regulation.

Enter the new kid in town, RegisteredCommons. Based at the University of Applied Sciences in Vorarlberg in Austria, RegisteredCommons offers creators the opportunity to attach a stamp specifying the date and time of licensing to their work. Essentially, this adds another layer of legal protections to works licensed under CC, and in the case of (more…)

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the Highway Africa conference held at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Over the years, Highway Africa has become one of the biggest ICT conferences in Africa with more than 500 delegates from all over the world gathering to discuss internet governance, ICT policy, media and democracy in a town where bars nearly outnumber churches.

One of the highlights of this year’s conference was the first Digital Citizens Indaba (DCI), a blogging conference with a specific focus on Africa. This free conference (delegates, for the most part, just had to cover their transport costs) was, according to co-ordinator Colin Daniels, “…a gathering of African bloggers, media practitioners, and civil society” and was less of a conference on (more…)

Prof. Larry Lessig gave his keynote speech on “The Read/Write Society” at the end of the second day of the Wizards of OS 4 conference (read part 1 and part 2 of our WOS 4 coverage). He began by telling the story of John Philip Sousa, an early 20th century American composer who believed that the development of first voice recording machines would “ruin artistic development” and cause “the vocal cord to [be] eliminated”. A year ago, I heard him use this example at the opening of ccPoland, where he used it to show how those with stakes in more traditional forms of cultural production can block the growth of novel forms - as is happening today with p2p technologies, for instance. This time, Larry Lessig pointed out a different issue - that the “machines” that Sousa was complaining about were in fact killing a more decentralised and grassroots form of cultural production. Times when “young people together [were] singing the songs of the day or old songs” were coming to an end.

Larry’s argument is that while the capacity to produce, and not just use cultural products was largely lost in the ‘Read Only’ 20th century, a ‘Read / Write’ culture is re-emerging in the (more…)