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We did an audio interview with Jason, where he expands on some of the ideas expressed in this article. To download the AAC file directly, click here. For the mp3 file, click here. And for the Ogg Vorbis file, click here.

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I work in moral philosophy, which means that I spend my time trying to understand values, and what they should mean for us. Rather than being abstracted from everyday life, this strikes me as one of the most practical things anyone could be concerned with. Nonetheless, this may come off a tad abstract ‘ but bear with me and I hope it’ll be worth it.

In this article I will discuss what I take to be meaningful convergences between ubuntu and the Free Culture/iCommons project ‘ starting with a brief outline of what ubuntu is (and isn’t).

Ubuntu is South Africa’s contribution to moral philosophy; an ethic entailing or entailed by the claim ‘umuntu ngumuntu (more…)

Beth Kanter writes a weekly column for TechSoup’s Netsquared site, she’s contributing editor at BlogHer, and maintains a blog called Beth’s Blog. Beth writes about NGOs, nonprofit technology, and social change and is an enthusiastic Creative Commons advocate; and will be contributing to icommons.org in the future.

That’s a photo I took of Marc Canter at the first Blogher Conference in July, 2005. I put it in flickr with an “All Rights Reserved” license, which is the Flickr default. Back then, I was totally ignorant of Creative Commons licensing versus ‘All Rights Reserved’. I had never changed it. (more…)

Academia is often accused of rejecting innovation and new concepts. In the current debate around open networks and access to knowledge, many universities are choosing to retreat behind expensive, outmoded, exclusionary systems of storing and sharing knowledge, which are beyond the reach of many students and researchers.

But there is a glimmer of hope shining from South Korea. The dCollection is a nationwide project to build knowledge information distribution systems on the web. It was founded by the Korean Education & Research Information Service (KERIS), which is operated under the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development of South Korea. Since 2003, KERIS has been building a web-based academic database with a unified format, so that researchers and students can access and refer to academic material in a more open environment. What makes this dCollection even more interesting is (more…)

iCommons, an organisation created to help coordinate and support global efforts to share educational content on the Internet, is launching an online project to try to learn what makes such efforts succeed.The new project, called iCommons iCurriculum, is intended to support a growing movement to share educational content on the Internet. Open education goes beyond posting textbooks online to offer tools that lets educators and learners share, reorganize and republish educational materials to suit their specific needs. (more…)

Episode 2 of the iCommons podcast is now online and ready to be downloaded!In this episode, we’ll be discussing plans for the iCommons summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 15 ‘17 of June: Daniela Faris explains the new-look artist in residence programme and Rebecca Kahn speaks to last year’s artist in residence Nathaniel Stern, about Dublin, net art and beer. Heather Ford gives us her hopes for the Commons in 2007 and there’s also a special report from Eva Lutterbuese, who is visiting us from the Creative Commons International office, and saving us from piles of paper. If you (more…)

I left frosty Berlin about two weeks ago, to visit sunny South Africa and the iCommons office in Johannesburg. My mission? To save iCommons from the piles of un-filed papers, disorganized cupboards and coffee-stained mugs ‘I basically came to visit so that I could get them organized!

I thought it might be of interest for you to give you a view of the office from behind the scenes. What do you think of when you imagine a globally operating non-profit organization with partners from all over the world? Thirty employees, and a nice, spacious office? Yes, that’s what I would think too. But let me reveal the truth about what the iCommons office in Rosebank, Johannesburg, really looks like.

These are my first impressions from when I stepped out of the airport shuttle. I am delivered at an expensive (more…)

A few weeks ago I asked the community the following question: “What do you think was the most exciting thing that happened in the commons during 2006, and what do you anticipate for the future of the commons for 2007?”

We thought that answering this question could garner some interesting responses on what has been done well, or what has gone terribly wrong, and what we can work towards as a community for the future. In fact, we may just do this exercise again a year from now to see how things have changed, and whether our hopes for 2007 have been fulfilled! Read on for some fantastically varied opinions.

(more…)

News just in! We’ve confirmed that Lawrence Liang, iCommons’ newest board member will be attending the iSummit 07 in Dubrovnik. Liang is a legal researcher with the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. His key areas of interest are in law, technology and culture, and he has written extensively on the topic of piracy, especially within the framework of the developing world. In light of the discussions on piracy on the iCommons mailing list (sign up here), we thought we’d find out what Lawrence had to say on the topic. (more…)

iCommons’ resident copyright expert, Tobias Schonwetter, discusses the fallacies of ‘international copyright’ and how the ‘3 step test’ lies at the heart of understanding how to support access to knowledge.

Although admittedly for very diverse reasons, I assume that the readers of this column are united in the aim to facilitate access to creative material and to reduce restrictions in this regard. And without a doubt, a number of valuable ideas have been brought forward in recent years. Yet, the legal framework against which such ideas have to be tested is regrettably often overlooked or, even worse, deliberately ignored: copyright law. If at all addressed in a discussion, the most benign term I have come across for this area of law from a non-lawyer has been ‘exotic’ even (more…)

Participants at the Science Commons-sponsored Designing Cyberinfrastructure conference offered so many different definitions for the word that speakers - only half jokingly suggested that a single set of quotation marks around the word wasn’t enough. And at the end of the two-day event, those intentional quotation marks were still being added.

Entitled ‘Designing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaboration and Innovation’ (DCCI), this conference brought together over 200 participants from across the world ‘ with government personalities commingling with open source advocates, academics, patent experts, and those in the sciences. The jam-packed program included panels ranging from defining (more…)