rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China, Photo by Tom Caswell

I just arrived back home in Guangzhou, China from the OpenCourseWare Conference in Dalian, China last weekend and met many great people (but don’t have the tolerance to write out the contents of my thoughts ;), had many fruitful discussions, and rocked out a good slide deck for ccLearn (and you!). Check out my presentation (or any of my presentations and here), “OER XinXai (NOW!)“:

The most fruitful part of the conference for me was interacting with Philip Schmidt, Victor from Hewlett Foundation, Chunyan Wang from CC Mainland China, and Stewart Cheifet from Internet Archive. Also, hearing about sustain-o-bility in all its forms as a major consideration for projects, and mentions of CC+, made me quite happy. It also served as a nice place to test out my Mandarin skills for the good or worse of things. Hopefully at the next conference there will be more time for discussion during the conference days.

I jumped up on stage to give a final call for participation to the ccLearn and OER regional meeting at iSummit July 29 - August 1 in order to increase participation by principals in the region. Let’s hope it worked!

After this conference, I directly headed to Beijing where I worked with CC Mainland China team on accelerating business development and assessing great projects which would be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing. If you have an organization in China or any jurisdiction and want to help in this process, check out the page CC Web Integration.

The next stop for me is to head to celebrate Lu’s 27th birthday on May 4th, then onto Japan to meet up Joi, Catharina, Fumi and more (ken!). Then back to Guangzhou, Beijing, then back to Guangzhou, then back in San Francisco May 21 through at least end of July as homebase. Cheers!

From a cold Beijing, that is amazingly cleaned up and metropolitan, merry xmas and happy holidays and happy new year!

Most importantly, happy 1 year anniversary to Lu for being married for one year (to me)! Its taken a massive amount of engineering to get here right now and to have some degrees of freedom for our lives, so pretty happy about that overall!

Now its time for me, my mom, dad, Lu and I to take 24 hour train to Guangzhou…geez, I miss my 14 hour battery now

Time to get sentimental and see some amazing country-side while my real imagination comes true. Time to hack on OpenMoko and Open Clip Art Library while on the train

BTW, while waiting for my parents at the Beijing International Airport, I decided to break from that activity to find the atm. While walking towards it, out from the domestic terminal came the the worlds tallest man!!!

I stopped dead in my track and like the other Chinese folks around me, pulled out my phone and took a picture!

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?