Icommons.org

A month or so ago iCommons webqueen, Daniela Faris interviewed me about Creative Commons’ second annual fundraising campaign. As stated in the interview, we chose to focus the 2006 campaign more on our community and raising CC awareness than solely on our financial need.

Since then Daniela, Heather and I have continued an exchange about the importance of our global community and how to best address their needs. We’ve acknowledged that raising money for a cause is always an area of interest so we thought that it would be interesting and perhaps even helpful for me to write candidly about the campaign.

The ideas that I’ve listed below are simple suggestions that I thought could be useful to reference when building your own strategy (more…)

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay launched Creative Commons India (ccIndia) this weekend, with the aim of providing easier access to educational and other content.

‘At IIT Bombay there is a lot of educational content, including web-based courses that the institute would like to make available under a flexible Creative Commons licence,’ said Professor Shishir K. Jha, project lead of Creative Commons India.

The ccIndia was formally launched on Friday 26 January at (more…)

One of the themes that is often raised in discussions within the iCommons community is this: open licensing is great for stimulating creativity for those who want to use it for their own works, but what effect can it have on civil society? How can using resources that are freely licensed make it simpler, better and faster for organisations, schools, NGOs and civil society groups to do their jobs?

In this month’s ‘10 of the best’ (this time, halved), we highlight the following five sites that are devoted to doing just that ‘ helping people get things done, better. And we think they’re doing a great job of it. (more…)

Hey iCommoners

Greetings from a hot and sunny University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Belville, South Africa.

I am working here as a volunteer under the auspices of IESC GeekCorps as part of the Digital Freedom Initiative, a USAID funded program. GeekCorps is currently sponsoring three volunteers, each for a period of three months, to assist in the development of a suite of open-source educational software tools. We will be focusing on a software platform called ‘Chisimba’, which is a framework (more…)

Digital Pioneers provides expertise and financial support to innovative internet initiatives of small-scale social organizations.

Founded in December 2002, the fund has supported over 130 projects, out of 875 applicants. The average amount of support is ‘¬16.000. The theme for the 12th round is ‘International’, and the deadline is 5 February.
Under this theme participants can submit a project proposal that is aimed at introducing an international project into the Netherlands. The initiative must (more…)

The fourth annivesary of the founding of Creative Commons coincided in Poland with a Do-It-Yourself festival called “PrzeTWORY”, which stretched over a weekend in Warsaw, Poland. Creative Commons Poland used the opportunity to celebrate the birthday by handing out gifts - DIY style.

The event was a two-day market of independent and DIY art, design and crafts, including works made during the festival from recycled goods provided by the organizers. The festival’s name, loosely translated, means both “recycled things” and “food preserves” - playfully showing roots of modern independent crafts.

(more…)

Last year’s annual Free Culture, Science and Technology festival held in Zagreb dealt with the proprietarisation of knowledge in medicine, agriculture and science through patents and copyrights ‘ and looked at counter-projects aimed at creating a “knowledge commons”. This year’s festival, which starts today and ends on 27 January, will focus on the ’spectrum’ commons, open communication technologies and citizen media. But why is this topic an important one to discuss? (more…)

The letter was drafted by Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Sarai).

Dear Inhabitants of the ‘legal’ Commons,

Greetings! This missive arrives at your threshold from the proverbial Asiatic street, located in the shadow of an improvised bazaar, where all manner of oriental pirates and other dodgy characters gather to trade in what many amongst you consider to be stolen goods. We call them ‘borrowed’ goods. But a difference in the language in which one talks about things (’stolen’ vs, ‘borrowed’) is a also a measure of the distance between two different worlds.

You can only steal something if it is owned by someone in the first place. If things are not ‘owned’ but only held in custody, then they can only be ‘borrowed’ as opposed to being stolen. So what you call a ‘pirated’ DVD is what we would call a DVD ‘borrowed’ from the (more…)

January 1 2007, was a big day for those of us in the Commons, as we welcomed the digital version of a New Year’s baby to the family - a brand new commons group in the Arabic speaking world.

The Arab Digital Commons (ADC) initiative was launched to promote and support the creation of works in Arabic that are licenced under Creative Commons.

The powerhouse behind the project is Anas Tawileh, who has been involved in the Free and Open Source Software movement in his home country of Syria for several years, promoting the use of FLOSS. (more…)

At the heart of the Commons movement is a simple yet powerful concept of sharing information and art for the enjoyment and the betterment of everyone’s lives. Much of this sharing is the result of widespread internet access and broadband availability, resources which many people do not have. Bridging the digital divide is by no means easy, though numerous organizations exist with that goal in mind. With organizations and groups like One Laptop Per Child and the Digital Divide Network, quite a few projects are getting widespread attention.

At the grassroots is a unique youth-led organization called Five Minutes to Midnight (FMM). FMM was originally started in 2003 as a blog about the war in Iraq when it was felt that the youth’s response to the war was uncoordinated and for the most part ignored. The blog eventually turned into an online magazine, published monthly and on topics ranging from malicious business practices to the psychology of torture. International development and politics were the focus and two years later, the website had readers, writers, and volunteers from over 30 countries ‘ it even self-published a book.

Last August, the organization underwent a major change moving from publishing to actively promoting media creation in developing countries. Partnering with Rafigui, a Chad-based organization (more…)