rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

I wrote before about what a great Free Software + Free Culture conference would look like. In response to my, “Is anyone interested in this,” I chatted with Mirko Lindner from CC Sweden, the upcoming FSCons conference in Sweden seems to get most of these ideas right!

One of my favorite “get it done” people, Michelle Thorne from CC, wrote a nice plug for the conference on the CC site:

Free Culture, Free Software, and Free Content will join forces under the banner of “Free Society” at FSCONS on October 24-26 at the IT University of Götheborg, Sweden. The orgnaizing trinity, Creative Commons Sweden, Free Software Foundation Europe, and Wikimedia Sverige, see FSCONS as a chance to reach out with their respective communities and build joint projects with like-minded activists and organizations.

A strong speakers lineup provides the rhetorical food-for-thought in the Free Culture track. Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons) asks, “How far is free culture behind free software?” as he charts key indicators and historical factors in the progress of each. Eva Hemmungs Wirten argues that the digital commons extends back to nineteenth-century London, while Oscar Swartz keynotes the events with the warning that Sweden’s controversial “Lex Orwell” may usher in “The End of Free Communication”.

In chatting with Mirko, he mentioned that they are still seeking travel sponsorships for the conference. In putting together Libre Graphics Meeting over the last three years, it is pretty obvious that the most important thing that a conference like this can do is provide travel sponsorship to the people making free culture happen. It gives the much needed face time that developers don’t get and provides a source of collective memory making to further focus development and personal relationships.

If you can help support the conference corporately or personally, please do contact Mirko and the other organizers to make a nod. Yes, I know this comes at a problematic time with the global economy, but please, contribution brings stability

Lu made a post about the Cantocore Export which I got to the last 15 minutes of after a trip to SF -> KC -> HKG -> Guangzhou Here is a nice glowing image from the opening:

I’m now in Beijing out at CaoChangDi near 798 (DaShanZi) living it up, coming out of my fake retirement and generally relishing the fact that I’m waking up and doing whatever I want to pretty much each day. Its pretty funny to be out here right now in a studio right next to Matt’s studio in nearly similar circumstance to our old UCSD VAF lifestyle of old.

The primary difference is that we are in Beijing, on the outskirts, next to a village from some other era, and have more resources to realize all those dreams. We had a bbq last night and pulled out one of two speakers custom beijing north sound system speakers and blasted it until midnight with no complaints. Fun!

Many fun projects on the horizon as I’m realizing many great things with space to deal with experiments and creativity once more. Cluster speakers, sustainable open source development, and a possible dubstep event are coming up quick!

I updated the Opening Remix Networks with some new slides, dropped some other wasteful ones, and I think the presentation is much better. Of course, there are times where I play video, and I’ve substituted slides for those clips and associated audio files.

I’m still interested in having a high-bling presentation app. I still can’t believe that this doesn’t exist on Linux. If someone else is interested in this, I would consider running funds through my company to build up an open source application to do this possibly based on clutter. Or, better yet, I should try out http://go-oo.org/ which has 3d effects, SVG support, and gstreamer support! Is there a Gentoo overlay for this?

I gave this presentation today at the famed Beijing-based Central Academy of Fine Arts in Deer Fang’s Experimental Video Lab course. It was strangely like a real art school!