Tag Archive for 'deerfang'

Why am I in China?

There are many reasons why I am spending half of my time in China now including:

  • My wife and her family are from China (Guangzhou specifically)
  • Community and Business Development opportunities for Creative Commons and Open Source in Asia, China in particular
  • The contemporary art and web startup scene is exploding in China
  • China has the most number (>210 M) of people online and the longest overall average time spent online: “Chinese Internet users log an average of 2 billion hours online each week, while the figure for US Internet users stands at 129 million.”
  • 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.

GDP chart over next few years

Lu is about to post some interesting things about the anti-CNN movement coming out of China post-bad-Western-press cropping.

50% Time! Go for it! Sweep the Leg Johnny and Edison Chen

Hi friends, I’m in SF this week until next Thursday before heading back to Guangzhou. For one, it is so nice to be back at our place in SF and to see how big our plants have gotten. I’m pretty happy with the move that Lu and I have made now that we are spending 50% of our time in China and 50% of our time in USA.

I’m upping my output here this weekend, so shoot me an email to reconnect while here in SF, and hopefully you will see some good results coming from the sweat of my palms/brow.

I spent all day at Internet Archive for a nice power packed session on Open Library project, which I’m working on with one of my funders ;)

I’m going to take the opportunity this weekend to get my taxes sorted out along with Lu’s parents, while also focusing on my own website and projects which haven’t seen enough love from me.

Also, I’m traveling mucho over the next months, so please keep up on my travel on the sidebar at right which is from dopplr.com.

I spent a few days last week at/around Joi Ito’s lab working alongside the brilliant Fumi and meeting up various friends like Jeff Kuntz and Matt Hope (totally random that matt was there!) businesses in Japan. I had a great time and look forward to heading back there in about a month to work on some big projects with some big and small companies.

When, I get back to China at the end of this week, I am looking forward to the warming weather in Guangzhou and getting going on several cool projects and hopefully hiring a couple of people to help Lu and I out with our projects…more on that later…also, if you sync up with my travel schedule, do ping me for meetups…need to build up the network and connect together resources!

Next Few Months in China and More

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:

VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! Show Some Color 2!

I wrote before about the Show Some Color 2 project put on by Fabricatorz.com (company Lu and I started). Please head over there and vote, vote, vote!

VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
SHOW SOME COLOR 2
HTTP://FABRICATORZ.COM

Six women were invited to perform their racial identities and video makers were invited to put their own spin on the women’s performances, live at the public media event, Show Some Color 2. Thanks to everyone who came that evening and now’s your chance to vote on your favorite performance and video clip submitted from the event and from online submissions.

Winning performer gets $150. Winning video maker gets $100
Voting ends Wed, November 28. Winner announced Thurs, November 29.
Voting and full length videos at http://fabricatorz.com

PLUS!
Don’t miss Show Some Color 2 on TV!
Accessf, Chanel 29 will air all the videos and clips, this Sun, November 18 at 3PM


Show Some Color 2 is sponsored by Southern Exposure. Thanks to Sarah for the text above.

Fabricatorz Show Some Color 2 Follow-up

Lu posted up some photos of our media event. We are going to roll deep to the Soex Reception tomorrow night with our crew and camera in hand!

Check out some of the photos:

Our best producer Sarah Wylie Ammerman post up some photos from our event last Tuesday on Fabricatorz.com. Bridget Lanigan took these images and she is our official photographer of the event. Following are some of the photos and Sarah Wylie’s comment:

The Crew minus a few, including Bridget, who’s behind the still camera.

the crew

Emcee Jon kept the night rolling smoothly.

sm2-141.jpg

Lu watching the project unfold with Brad.

2-226.jpg

Mark captured the performances - his screen was projected in real time in the space.

sm2-081.jpg

Amy kicked off the night with her multi-persona routine.

sm2-170.jpg

Liesa goes white-face with sugar icing.


(vote for Liesa here!)

sm2-244.jpg

Sharay used her personal to present her political.


(vote for Sharay here!)

sm2-275.jpg

It’s hard to show Magdalena’s performance with just one picture, but here’s a try!


(vote for Magdalena here!)

sm2-316.jpg

The audience helped Naoko raise her fur-less teddy bears as a backdrop.


(vote for Naoko here!)

sm2-360.jpg

At the end, the floor was opened up to anyone who wanted to speak up!

sm2-466.jpg

Media Events as Digital/Neo-Happenings

I’ve done a lot of work in the area of what some called, Digital Happenings, with Mesh.FM, setting up SFAI Design + Technology Salons and more recently the Creative Commons Salons in SF. Oh, and then, lets not forget then the great amount of work that has gone into Overlap.org’s several releases, multiple live shows, and coordination. For now, lets juts not talk about the open source projects.

Lu and I have been brewing these ideas together into, what I’m calling, Media Events, where the prime focus is to destroy the proscenium model and focus on making the main participants of an event both the performers/creators/producers and the consumers. Another way to look at this “media event” is that the performers become the audience, and vice versa, or for this event, the performers and media are in a flattened hierarchy, but that sounds too static. In Lessig-speak, the event is attempting to be media-centric “read/write” culture-y (that is Eric Steuer speak) :)

Tomorrow night, October 30 @ 111 Minna in downtown San Francisco, we will be experimenting with the “Media Event” setup with the Show Some Color 2 event I blogged about previously.

Show Some Color 2

Come out tomorrow night from 6-9 PM! We are still hopeful to get a few more people there with video cameras. We will have all recorders (vloggers) license their work under a CC BY license, thus retaining their full copyright. Similarly, all people who come into the space are required to sign a model release form for more certainty for all recording. We are trying to do this legit, but also generate media from every single person who enters the space, and also provide copyright-awareness-power to the recorders of video.

Come on out and join us in this endeavour! Our goal is to generate some interesting content, but my alterior motive is to generate piles of content from the event and see how to make a simple happy hour have the magnitude of a large press conference…maybe as big as the hulu all night conference call :)

Three Questions from Dim-Sum Restaurant

(CAUTION: I cuss like a sailor in this video Lu took)