By now many of you must have heard about this year’s Free Culture research workshop, to be held at the Berkman Center in Harvard. It has been posted on the Berkman web and reposted on many other places. This post is mainly to alert everyone to the fact that the deadline for the open call for participation is coming up real soon now: August 9.
From the CFP:
The Free Culture 2009 research workshop builds on the enthusiasm generated by the First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture which took place during the 2008 iSummit in Sapporo, Japan. It presents a unique opportunity for scholars whose work contributes to the promotion, study or criticism of an emerging Free Culture, to engage with a multidisciplinary group of academic peers and practitioners, identify the most important research opportunities and challenges, and attempt to chart the future of Free Culture.
Our aim is to provide an opportunity for scholars and practitioners to discuss their findings, experiences, and vision for a Free Culture with peers whose backgrounds extend beyond individual disciplines, because we believe that the wider participation in the creative process (and consequently in the formation and dissemination of our modern culture) enabled by new Internet technologies, innovative legal solutions and new business models, are far-reaching and therefore deserve to be examined through the lens of multidisciplinary inquiry. More specifically, this year’s workshop will be focused on:
(a) participant interaction and joint reflection on key findings from cutting edge research in the field
(b) the development of a research agenda, with the identification of key topics for future research
(c) facilitating research collaborations and exchange of ideas between different academic institutions engaged in Free Culture research
(d) fostering useful academic outputs over the next 12+ months
(e) considering policy recommendations or a policy orientation that may emerge as a result of Free Culture research and scholarship
It is finally done… after much delay and a couple of suggestions and corrections by iSummit participants, I managed to publish online a report from Free Culture 2008, the research workshop I helped organize during the iSummit in Sapporo, on the themes of sharing, online freedom and collaboration, commons-based peer production and Creative Commons licensing. Click here to go to the report on the commonsresearch wiki, which also contains the program of the workshop. The report is pretty comprehensive and leaves little else to say, but if you’re reading this let me just say that I feel lucky to be part of a community of people who are willing to dedicate what precious little time they have to helping set up this workshop. I think this has a lot of potential and we’re already starting to plan for Free Culture 2009!
If you’re reading this for the first time and have no idea what it is all about, the wiki contains a lot more information. The whole idea basically started from a few of us (mostly CC-affiliated academics) thinking that we need a forum to exchange our ideas and findings on research pertaining to aspects of the digital commons. Then one thing led to another, and in what I think would make an exemplary case study of online collective action, we managed to set up Free Culture 2008 and generated enough interest to get everyone talking about a follow-up conference in 2009 (which, like the 2008 event, will not be limited to just CC-related topics). I will post more on these plans as soon as they start to take shape.
We recently announced the launch of Creative Commons in Singapore, at an event hosted by the ISEA conference at NTU and through an official press release from Creative Commons.
This means that soon Singapore-based authors/creators/institutions with an interest in sharing their content more openly with the rest of the world will be able to use Creative Commons licenses tailored to the legal tradition and language of Singapore, so as to ensure that the license terms will be easier to understand and interpret correctly. It also means that we have one more reason now to start building a community of like-minded people with a common interest in the role of ownership, intellectual property and “openness” on the Internet and more specifically in the context of Singapore and the region.
Now the CC Singapore licenses are not online yet due to some technical issues, which we hope to resolve very soon. But in the meantime, Ivan Chew, whom I met at a recent event of the Lien Centre for Social Innovation at SMU, has taken the initiative to create a much needed blog for CC Singapore, a place to post announcements, meet and discuss CC in the context of Singapore. The blog is already off to a great start, so do take a look at it and post any questions or comments relating to Creative Commons in general, and its introduction in Singapore in particular. See you there!
While Singapore is bracing itself for the local launch of Creative Commons (ok, perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit, but it is an important milestone), Sapporo is getting ready to welcome the largest international annual event of the Creative Commons and related communities: the iSummit. This year we are organizing for the first time a research workshop during the iSummit, the First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture (or Free Culture 2008 for short), whose detailed program can be found on the Commons Research Wiki I set up for this purpose. All submissions to the workshop were peer-reviewed and the extended abstracts (in some cases also full papers) are published on the wiki.
If you’ve already registered for the iSummit, then good for you, I think you’re in for a treat. If not, then hmm… tough luck, I think registration is closed now but there will be plenty to follow online, through the iSummit website (see link above), the icommons main community website, the research wiki (see above) and even on Second Life (for more info on how to follow the proceedings and get involved remotely keep checking the main iSummit website. So, here goes, all the info you need in a short post, as I need to get my slides ready for Sapporo! That, and a million other things as usual, but I won’t complain here, this is meant to be a joyous post after all.
More great news this week. Creative Commons Singapore will finally launch localized versions of the CC licenses, and the official launch event will take place this Sunday, July 27, at the School of Art, Design and Media of NTU (map), at 1:30pm. Make no mistake, this is not just about the licenses and not just for lawyers. This is the first opportunity to promote a wider dialogue on the value of intellectual property and how digital distribution and Creative Commons are changing the game, giving more power and options to both established, ‘old-school’ creators of new media content as well as the millions of amateurs and pro-ams who post music, video, text and photos on the Social Web. So, do make the long trip to NTU and join us in our effort to get Singapore on the CC bandwagon.
The event will take place under the auspices of ISEA 2008, a huge digital arts event and conference taking place in Singapore this year, and although the conference is for registered participants only, the CC launch (and the ensuing panel on copyright) will be open to the public. Just come to the ADM School at NTU and you will be guided from there, to find the exact venue. I do not know for sure which room the event will take place in and what the capacity will be, so if you want to get a seat it might be wise to come a bit early.
More specifically, the launch of the Singapore CC licensing suite will take place at 1.30 to 1.45 pm, and will be graced by the presence of Creative Commons father (and for all who know him, an awesome speaker), Lawrence Lessig. The launch will be followed by a panel on Copyright and the Creative Commons, organized by CAPTEL and the CC Singapore team (which includes yours truly). The panel will end at 3:15 pm, at which point we will have to leave the premises probably as the rest of ISEA is, as I already mentioned, not open to the public (unless you have a ticket). Lessig will give a keynote later in the day for the ISEA conference, but to attend that you would need to have a ticket for the day for ISEA – you may be able to get one from their website if you want to get more Lessig (and I’m told the entire ISEA conference will be extremely interesting, so it’s probably worth it anyhow.
July 24, 2008 at 10:41 pm
· Filed under News, Personal ·Tagged CNM
So, here is me coming out about my new (professional) home… just this week I joined the Communications and New Media Programme at the National University of Singapore. Those who care to read this blog will know that I came to Singapore about 2 years ago, with a visiting appointment at the School of Information Systems of Singapore Management University. The time at SMU was great, intensive and very productive. It helped me launch the CC-Monitor project and make a few contributions to the research and practice of commons-based peer production.
Given that I quite liked Singapore and needed to find a more long-term home for my work with a good fit with my research interests I came in touch with the folks at CNM, then one thing led to another, and now I’m sitting at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, my new home away from home. It’s quite a change, to be sure, and my roots are still in CS/IS, but as the Internet becomes increasingly “social”, getting more involved with the social sciences feels like a natural progression. CNM in particular is a unique place that blends computer science and the social sciences in its mission to promote the study and development of communications and new media.
I could go on and on about all the interesting new possibilities that this move is opening up, but I will leave it at that for now and move on to more news… this blog hasn’t seen updates in a while and there’s a lot to share…
And now for some really good news: the website for the new iSummit (i.e. the largest and most exciting annual event around the Creative Commons and related communities) is up and looking pretty sweet. Also, this year for the first time I am co-organizing a Research Workshop at the iSummit, together with Jonathan Zittrain and Tyng-Ruey Chuang. The deadline for submissions to the workshop is April 26 and in fact we only ask for extended abstracts and not full papers, so if you’re working on any of the themes of the workshop do send your work and help us build a multidisciplinary research agenda for issues that are relevant to the promotion and sustainability of a global digital commons.
CALL FOR PAPERS
First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture
Hosted at the fourth annual iSummit, 29 Jul -1 Aug, 2008, Sapporo, Japan
With submission deadline: 26 April, 2008
The First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture presents a unique opportunity for scholars with various backgrounds, whose work contributes to the promotion or study of an emerging Free Culture, to present their research work to a multidisciplinary audience of academic peers and practitioners. It will be held in conjunction with the fourth iSummit, one of the largest annual events for the Free Culture and related movements. Our aim is to provide a platform for scholars to communicate their findings to an audience that extends beyond individual disciplines because we believe that the wider participation in the creative process (and consequently in the formation and dissemination of our modern culture) enabled by new Internet technologies, innovative legal solutions and new business models, are far-reaching and therefore deserve to be examined through the lens of multidisciplinary inquiry.
The focus of the workshop will be on the presentation and critique of work in progress, and with the inclusion of both academic researchers and practitioners, so as to produce a holistic perspective on the future of a more participative, open and free information society. Workshop participants will have the chance to present their work at an event which attracts some of the world’s foremost thinkers on the future of the Internet, as well as practitioners, technologists, activists and artists who help shape that future.
It’s been quite a while that I haven’t posted anything on this blog and many things have happened since. Starting from the lighter side of life, here’s two pictures I thought I should share, a small sample of the beauty of this part of the world:
Borobudur, Java, Indonesia
And for more glitz and glam:
Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Grand Palace, Bangkok, Thailand
I’m very excited about having finally managed to sort through the data and produce what I believe are some of the first visualizations of our contemporary remix culture. The data is from the ccMixter online community which is focused on music production and remixing. We have managed to plot all the links between source and derivative works in this community and have conducted a preliminary analysis at the Participatory Media Lab, with the aim to understand the structure and the dynamics of participative action, especially as relating to the collaborative production of digital media content.
One of the visualizations, consisting of all uploaded audio tracks that have been remixed and all remixes thereof, is shown below. I was very surprised by the structure, density and connectedness of the resulting network. I was expecting to see a more weakly connected set of “islands of common interest”, as defined by genre, friendships or location. Instead, before we even go into deeper analysis, the figure suggests that the creative reuse of cultural content (such as enabled by licenses like Creative Commons) leads to a very high degree of cross-pollination across authors and across works, forming a dense network of greatly enhanced collaboration and creativity through open sharing and reuse. We have posted a working paper and more cool hi-res visuals on the Participatory Media Lab wiki.
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