Icommons.org

Creative Commons Salons have been held in San Francisco, New York, Warsaw, Seoul and Johannesburg, and now the city of Amsterdam will host its very own ccSalon too.

The first Dutch ccSalon will kick off on Wednesday 13 December at 20:30 in ‘De Melkweg‘ Amsterdam and will be focused on music and sounds.

The evening will start with an interesting talk by the Italian ’stand-up’ sociologist Sergio Messina about ‘How to Write a Song and Go to Jail.’

If you haven’t been detained by the local authorities after Sergio’s talk you can enjoy the presentation by Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer of Soundtransit. This project combines the passion of (more…)

Imagine showcasing a feature film, not only on a cinema screen, but simultaneously on a computer screen too. Imagine that on the première day of Troy or Titanic, or any boxoffice hit, the movie was also released on online peer-to-peer networks too. A Utopian idea yes, and while you may be pondering if this could ever happen, we can stop you in your tracks and say - it already did! This scenario became a reality when Brazilian director, Bruno Vianna released his first full-length feature film, Cafuné.

Vianna chose to use several innovative distribution strategies for (more…)

In the second part of the Digital Hero Book Project series, Steve explores the use of digital storytelling for advocacy and as a democratising agent in a world where dominant media giants often portray only half the story. He speaks to Amy Hill, Director of Community Projects at the Center for Digital Storytelling, the birthplace of this modern twist on the age-old art of telling stories.

icommons.org: What do you do at the Center?
Amy: I oversee our various initiatives done in partnership with grassroots groups, nonprofit organizations, health and social services agencies ‘ all for purposes of integrating digital storytelling practices into efforts to promote individual and community health and well-being, and support campaigns for social, environmental, and economic justice. This involves developing collaborative relationships, (more…)

One of the things that freelance journalists learn very quickly is that your work, no matter how hard you’ve slaved over it, has a very short shelf life. News cycles are getting shorter and shorter, and while the demand for up-to-the-minute content is growing, this content has an extremely limited lifespan on the traditional news wires.

This is particularly true for photographers, who are trained to capture a moment that, within a few days (or even hours) may be used to (excuse the cynicism - journalists are a jaded bunch) to wrap up last night’s vegetable peelings.

How to get more use out of work, outside of a news context is something many journalists are (more…)

From 31 October to 2 November, I attended the inaugural United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens, Greece. The forum stems from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a global effort to address how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used for development.

Being a UN summit, its format was based on the creation of texts: the 2003 Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action and the 2005 Tunis Commitment and Agenda for the Information Society. But this Summit was also different: it took a multi-stakeholder approach, allowing business and non-governmental voices into the sessions where the texts were being thrashed out by governments, (more…)

How to govern open societies has been a topic of heated discussion for many people at iCommons. How does a community, that is open and transparent, take decisions? How does a community that is open, transparent and global take decisions? How can excellent products be developed if the people working on them are all volunteers?

The obvious thing to do, when faced with questions like this, is to look to the experts to ask how others have approached this question. Ubuntu, the Linux distribution founded by Mark Shuttleworth is a great example of a successful, evolving open society, which has had to invent it’s own ways of doing things.

iCommons spoke to Mark Shuttleworth about the founding of Ubuntu and how the community developed its methods of governance and how they are evolving.

What were the founding principles behind Ubuntu?

Right from the beginning, the goal was to produce a high quality distro that would always be made freely available to the public. Ubuntu was founded because I didn’t believe that any of the existing companies producing Linux distributions would keep their products free in the long term. I believed that there (more…)

This month our 10 questions go to Judge Jongsoo Yoon, Judge for the Seoul Northern District Court of Korea and coordinator at the Korean Association For Infomedia Law (KAFIL). Judge Yoon played a central role in the porting of CC licences to South Korea. And who would have known that this CC enthusiast has a penchant for Linkin Park? Read on…

1. How did you get involved in Creative Commons Korea?
In 2003, Glenn Otis Brown who was Executive Director of Creative Commons at that time, was invited to the Symposium held by (more…)