Archive for September, 2008

Report from Free Culture 2008

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.

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CC Singapore

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!

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Oktapodi

This short is so cute and so well done… and it’s situated on a Greek island, though it’s apparently made by French students. I just had to post it!

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