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.
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!
It is still not too late to donate money (you can use paypal with the previous link which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world
The dollar, pound and euro still stretches further here, at least for the next few years
And, CEO Ito (ok, just Joi, no longer Chairman Ito just posted a nice chart showing approximate growth of GDP where China will eclipse the US in approximately 2030. Diversify your investment friends and push hard on reforms in china on the evironment and lowering the transaction cost on several economic barriers and IMO, decreasing the number of dropped and/or reset packets on the internet. Finally, the GFW needs to be turned off. Imagine 210M+ internet users all fittting through a huge (tiny) bottleneck of filters…it is a horrible barrier to efficient business transactions.
Lu is about to post some interesting things about the anti-CNN movement coming out of China post-bad-Western-press cropping.
That’s right! We have ~ 2 days left on our fundraiser to bring in USD$ 20,000.00 by April 18. We have ~240 pledges from community members totally USD$ ~10K right now and need to bring it home with 10K more by the end of the day! If you have a large contributions and/or are a business with a large contribution and would like to match this, contact me asap! We have received much press and attention from this grass roots campaign, and your support of this would help put us over the edge!
Who wants to be a big hero like the ~240 people who have contributed? This is an amazing fundraiser and its great to see the big numbers of people who have supported this campaign! Check out the stats in that we have over 720,000 views of this campaign! That is astounding!
Elsewhere on the web, others have made great posts about this like Andy’s post on LGM2008, excerpted below:
LGM is the only shared expense of all free graphics software. Certainly at worthwhile investment for the future of your unencumbered creativity!
you cannot put a price on quality, freedom and this much potential
Every year all projects gain a huge boost of development and vision thanks to the discussions that take place at LGM.
You cannot predict the amazing things that will take place at LGM.
will Blender uncover a new compositing method for video,
will inkscape enable a new type of spline through cairo?
will pango get used by fontforge ?
will ufraw and hugin share more code ?
One thing is certain;
All free creative software is improved during LGM. and everyone learns more in the process.
This is a one of a kind event!
Help us achieve our goal and bring together software developers to solve problems for all users of your favorite creative applications!
As a side note, I will be attending this LGM in Poland and will be in Berlin and Poland having some meetings and giving some presentations prior…if you are in the area, contact me and/or stay tuned for more.
Here is my post about speaking before the 2nd Blender Peach Open Source movie and slides:
Read this doc on Scribd: Blender Open Movie Premiere and Making Open Sustainable Millions of pieces of CC-licensed content By bookishinnorthpark, http://flickr.com/photos/susan_w/1472641471/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0 By platinumblondelife, http://flickr.com/photos/platinumblondelife5/123381310/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 Share or Ton is Smart!
And the post:
If you haven’t been to Amsterdam or checked out what great work PaulKeller and CC Netherlands is doing, then I highly recommend you A.) get here when you can by jet, or B.) tap into their great projects on the net. In particular, I’m referring to the big premiere 2nd Annual Blender Peach Open Movie in Amsterdam last night. I had the great honor of speaking before the premiere which actually felt more like a warm-up gig — I took it on myself to get people pumped up for the film (laughing, chanting, etc). You can also see my slides here which debut a new style using the CC Sharing Creative Works Comics (which you may download now and translate, just as CC Netherlands has done and made availabe in a booklet here).
And finally, I spoke on a panel today called “Commons-based Peer Production” at the Economies of the Commons conference put on by CC Netherlands and others:
Strategies for Sustainable Access and Creative Reuse of Images and Sounds Online
International Working Conference
Amsterdam & Hilversum 10, 11 & 12 April 2008
This dossier documents and brings together background materials for the international conference Economies of the Commons. This public working conference and its side programs address the remarkable cultural, educational and societal significance of the new types of audiovisual commons resources that are currently being created on the internet. Sustainable public access and enhanced opportunities for creative reuse of these resources are the particular focus of this conference and this web dossier.
My panel and fellow panelists are described below:
After the lunch we continue with the second session about Commons-based Peer Production. How do new developments of creative reuse hold out against market-based production? With Felix Stalder (Open Flows), Jamie King (Steal This Film), Jon Phillips (Creative Commons) en Sebastian LÃŒtgert (oil21.org).
The panel came down to Ton Rosendaal from Blender Foundation describing his model for sustainability for Open film projects (something you will hear me describe in more depth coming soon) and Jamie King’s promise for creating a better voluntary donation system. I took the position as the realist on the panel to reel in the gradient between what commercial entities are presently doing to sustain content distribution (and production in some instances) with the approaches outlined to provide a path of realidad
I’m re-blogging Mike’s post to hopefully hit a bunch of other eyes in the free and open source community about some real research on free and open source/content culture. That’s right! I’m not talking about that research-I’m-a-spammer-sourceforge-fill-out-my-questionnaire-type-ish! This is real talk! Giorgos is a good friend too so hopefully all you academics out there even slightly interested in this area will join into this pile up. This will make iSummit worth the trip.
Submissions are due April 26. This track should make iSummit 2008 the most exciting so far. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
Studies on the use and growth of open/free licensing models;
Critical analyses of the role of Creative Commons or similar models in promoting a free culture;
Building innovative technical, legal or business solutions and interfaces between the sharing economy and the commercial economy;
Modelling incentives, innovation and community dynamics in open collaborative peer production and in related social networks;
Economic models for the sustainability of Commons-based production;
Successes and failures of open licensing;
Analyses of policies, court rulings or industry moves that influence the future of Free Culture;
Regional studies of Free Culture;
Lessons from implementations of open/free licensing and distribution models for specific communities;
Definitions of openness and freedom for different media types, users and communities;
Broader sociopolitical, legal and cultural implications of Free Culture initiatives and peer production practices.
The iSummit overall will be the most diverse yet. Submissions for other tracks are due April 18, more info here.
Jon Phillips is an artist and entrepreneur with 14+ years of experience building communities and growing successful media projects. He is currently developing the Open Source project the Open Clip Art Library, works for Creative Commons as Community and Business Development Manager, is growing Overlap.org and Fabricatorz.com.
which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world 
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