I can’t get enough of posting my slideshows. Here are the public projects I’m pushing right now as of March 2008. Note, much is missing from this presentation as well as the all the on-going projects and things that emerge from chaos!
Tag Archive for 'asia'
Photo by Rebecca McKinnon
Its hard to follow-up when others have done it much better than I could 
Reports are pouring in from ACIA: the International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age, held on January 19-20 in Taipei, Taiwan. The resounding conclusion: it was a phenomenal success!
The workshop, organized by CC Taiwan and hosted at Academica Sinica, focused on bringing together members of the “Asia Commons” to meet and discuss regional strategies and initiatives. The program opened with a keynote by Terry Fischer on “Solutions to the copyright crisis,” in which he sought to combine legal reforms and business models with digital technologies that compensate creators while enabling cultural and economic benefits. Both Ts’ui-jung Liu, VP of Academia Sinica, and Der Tsai Lee, director of the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, were at the opening ceremonies and delivered greetings to the workshop participants.
CC Vice President Mike Linksvayer chaired a session featuring plans for “The Making a Totally Open Phone”, Sony’s integration of CC licensing for their eyeVio video sharing service, techniques in musical collaboration with “Jamming with Machines”, and “Making Creative Commons Common in Asia” by CC’s Jon Phillips (slides).
Later in the day, CC Australia Project Manager Jessica Coates presented open licensing compatibility in “Playing Well With Others” at a panel with Chunyan Wang from CC China Mainland and Alina Ng from CC Malaysia. The CC Team from Australia and the Creative Commons Clinic also announced the release of the Asia and the Commons case studies booklet, a fantastic collection of reports on individuals and organizations engaged in the commons in the Asia-Pacific region.
Their work was followed by Lawrence Liang and his debate about concepts, “How Does An Asian Commons Mean.” The ACIA workshop drew to an close with Chu-Cheng Huang’s final remarks on the changing phases of property in “From res nullius to res communis,” a session chaired by the event’s organizer, Tyng-Ruey Chuang from CC Taiwan.
The social program picked up as the sun set with the CC Asia Mega Mix Concert featuring acts by Monbaza; Pig Head Skin; MoShang (video), Kuo Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan, and André van Rensburg, Bust This, Sudev Bangah, and Lisa Diy.
There are plenty of pictures here and here. Formal proceedings from ACIA are available for download, and of course the case studies and discussion summary are well worth a read.
Asia and the Commons Case Studies 2008, presented at the ACIA workshop. The project, initiated by CCau and the Creative Commons Clinic, represents an effort to uncover exemplary individuals and organizations engaged in the commons in the Asia-Pacific region.
Photo by Rebecca McKinnon
And, Rebecca McKinnon posted some great insights into Asia and Isaac Mao’s concept of “Sharism” and the place of CC in Asia:
Many people attending the meeting in Taipei wondered whether Creative Commons in Asia is likely to be more successful as a social movement than as a set of copyright licenses (as Peter Yu has pointed out in the past). There was also a feeling that in order to be truly relevant to the globe, the CC movement’s central message needs to undergo a shift that would incorporate more non-Western approaches to the idea of “commons,” content creation, and sharing.
And, then she offered through Isaac Mao’s concept, a conceptual framework for moving this forward:
During Sunday’s discussion, Isaac Mao raised his idea of "sharism" as a framework for promoting the goals of Creative Commons that is more likely to gain widespread acceptance in Asia, in contrast to Lessig-esque terrms like "free culture." The problem, as Liang pointed out, is that the words "free" and "freedom" have been irreparably polluted by American geopolitics and tainted by perceived agendas of regime change, making anything labeled with those words a hard sell in the developing world. Riffing off the expression "free as in beer," he remarked: "free as in America is unhelpful." There was a widespread sense among people in the room that an emphasis on "public good" and "sharing" will enable the movement to have a much deeper impact, ultimately.
Hopefully by having myself in Guangzhou, China over the next 6 months and Catharina Maracke (CCi Director) in Tokyo more regularly over the next 6 months to a year will hopefully place some emphasis on asia beyond the already super-active CC affiliates in the region.
I realized that I am now in one of the most copyright-free zones: Guangzhou, China. This is the place where fashion designers unique designs are instantly copied. It is possibly one of the places where the barriers to creation are removed (or ignored) and you can find popular software and movies every few feet for a few dollars.
I will write more about this, but for now, I want everyone to know that myself and lu are spending the next few months (until end of May 2008) in China as our main base where I’ll continue to work for Creative Commons doing BizDev and Community Management, and will keep pushing on all my other projects. BTW, Lu and I still live in San Francisco. Our home-base is there, but we want to lock down our Chinese-base now
So, if you are in and around China: Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo and so on, please do shoot me an email and lets get things (more) cooking.
For now, I’m going on vacation until right after the new year and will emerge and first off head to Workshop on Asia and Commons in Taiwan January 17. If you are in the region, it will be a brilliant meeting that will entail OpenMoko folks, Sony folks, Mike Linksvayer, and so many more people working on building the commons.
In the meantime, check out this great video made by a famous hiphop artist in Korea with video made by an artist in the community to explain Creative Commons to others:
Ok, check out these cool site. First, test out if your sites work in China and also see what makes it through the censors through their proxy on Great Firewall of China.
And, also, check out the “youtube for documents,” Scribd. Notice that they have CC license support and I’m connecting with them to get better support. It is an excellent project that can transcode your uploaded documents into multiple formats and have the full youtube-like services around it.
So, it seems that Sound Systems harassment happens both in real space and in the virtual world, as has happened to me now in both places.
So, similar to sound systems that I built with Natty and Matt Hope, I one day decided to try and get more people to build in CC’s space on Second Life by buliding the (virtual) world’s largest sound system.
I did a pretty good job of making the speakers of all different types, licensed them properly with the hopes of getting more people to copy and make their own sound systems, in the true Jamaican Sound System way.
Anyway, I forgot about this mini-project from time to time, but then started to get these negative comments about having to remove this sound system from the already nearly-empty space of CC SL land. I stuck to my guns and said anyone can change them, yet no one really did. Time went on and one day I got an email out of the blue for them to be exhibited at big art show at 798 space in Beijing, in real life. Finally, someone appreciated this creation
Well, now, again, I’ve received the request to remove them, and I enabled sharing for all the speakers, with the same “Open” attitude as with Open Source, Wikipedia, etc. It looks like there is going to be restructuring, so I wanted to make sure things are mobile.
I suddenly realized the same situation is now happening that happened before when I had a sound system: the harassment and hating of bass that comes from people who are either not partaking (partying) around a system, who created it, or who belong to the sound system crew.
So, yet again, there is more support that the virtual mimics the physical. And, with the addition of virtual limitless copying, I challenge anyone to copy these speakers, modify them and do something, rather than nothing in the metaverse.
In fact, I will make sure that anyone who participates in spreading these speakers, modifying them, etc, gets credit at the show in Beijing, China, when it happens. Now there is a resume/CV incentive! Are you in?
Come on Japanese government, do the right thing, fess up to the crimes against women forced into sex slavery in WWII.
Amazing at the level of denial going on by the Japanese government over past crimes. If you have Japanese citizenship, let your government have it until it fesses up!
So, I just read Harold Welte’s blog post about the delays on OpenMoko and how it is basically a cultural issue. Their team has basically 4-5 Open Source hackers and a team of about 50-60 (I’m guessing slightly). Thus, most of these workers I’m assuming are in Taiwan and China and have rarely touched Open Source, nor have come into contact with the culture of Open Source development. Harold notes:
In the end (up to now) I have been doing tons of more things. I’ve been doing hardware related debugging, hot-fixing and consulting, providing lots of support for our internal development team, doing all the system administration, configuration and maintenance of our four physical and about 15 virtual machines (wiki, lists, gforge, svn, build server, etc.). Today I even spent a lot of time on web related issues [hey, I haven't done much web stuff since HTML4 and CSS1 came out], since we have committed to go public with our web sites public at some point.
We’ve had to teach people how to use request tracker, bugzilla, subversion, mailing lists, IRC. Those basic means of communication, natural for everyone ever involved in a FOSS project are all things that we had to bootstrap here.
Many of the things that are a complete given for me (and even us, the rest of the core team consisting of Sean, Werner, Mickey and myself) are not at all known, valued and/or respected [yet] by the various people and entities we had to relate in this project.
This problem is so very familiar to when I worked for Gopets in Korea. While my friends and colleagues there are some of my best friends, the economics and culture of Open Source had not struck. Thus, I spent so much of my time just helping people get up to speed on what is Subversion (how you need to check-in often), bugtracker (which no one used), and other forms of communication. It took much energy, but I slowly helped to convert a few people.
So, when I read Harold’s post about these issues, I immediately started to think about how to get more people into Open Source in Asia, particularly Mainland China and Taiwan.
First of all, nothing can stand-in for pure experience. But, for crash course cultural learning for developers and others, I think it should be mandatory learning to read Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software book. Oh, and guess what, the book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 1.0 license. So, not only is it available, all the sources are available. Thus, anyone could help translate this book.
So, my question out into the ethos is, do translations of this book exist? And, if not, would anyone out there in Taiwan and China be interested in helping to translate this book? I’m really serious, this endeavour would be of huge benefit to the world of Chinese and Taiwanese companies breaking into Open Source and for companies that have some form of outsourcing. Please comment on this post if you know of a translation and/or would like help translate this book. The sources are online, so we could submit a patch to Karl Fogel.
I just emailed Karl to see if he is into these things, as you can see:
Hi Karl, first of all, your book is a classic. I have a book that I’m putting out that deals with the issues you bring out so clearly, with relation to social sciences.
However, the reason I’m emailing you is to both say hi, from Creative Commons, as I see that you book is CC BY-SA licensed. I am the community developer/open souce developer/bizdev guy for them…so so happy to see your book is under cc license.
Also, I’m interested in translations of your book, particularly into Complex and Simplified Chinese? I want to help teach some people in China about Open Source, and your book is a must read.
Do translations exist, and if not, I’m advocating this. If translations get made, would you consider linking to them and or accepting them as patches to your SVN module?
This would be amazing for outsourcing companies, etc.
You are great.
Oh, on Open Source side I’m a core developer on Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library…
Cheers!
Jon
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