rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

Here are my slides from last night’s presentation at the BLUG. I continue to be amazed about how interested some people in Beijing are about FLOSS, Network Services, and guangxi! We had a good discussion about why some people contribute to open source. Similar to many trends with FLOSS communities, most people were into contributing because they wanted to learn more. Some said they were interested in meeting new people while a couple of folks mentioned how their contributions got them a job — something recurring with many of my friends (myself included).

Why Share Source & High Priority Free Culture Projects Beijing LUG 2008

I then drilled down and started a discussion about what are possible priorities for FLOSS, then Free Culture, and then Autonomo.us network services. This then segued (not the nerd chariot) into a discussion about what the attendees top 3 priorities are and what the top priorities are for Chinese FLOSS communities.

Some stated that translation and localization are critical for Chinese FLOSS communities. However, we are not talking about just change some strings. What Chinese users prefer is a localized interfaces. CEO of Mozilla Online, Li Gong, told me this as well the other day — Chinese users prefer their own cultural interface.

Then I met Peter Junge, who organized the OpenOffice.org conference last week and sponsors the BLUG free beer through his employer Red Flag. I learned from him that Red Flag does just this by creating their own positive fork of OpenOffice.org called Red Office, which provides a cultural interface. Try it out, Clayton Cornell, from Sun said it is an interested usable interface.

The most interesting and tangible should be priority for Chinese FLOSS communities came from a fellow named Anthony Wong who said there is no good quality FREE (as in CC BY-SA or GNU FDL) Chinese dictionary for FLOSS. Currently, most people use proprietary dictionaries with StarDict. We discussed this further and what it would take to get this to happen and came to the idea that its:

• A great tangible project
• Should integrate with wiktionary and provide some filters for converting to StarDict and other formats
• Could take advantage of Chinese Public Domain rules to slurp in dictionaries
• Great project for those learning Chinese (like me!

There are still some other issues which need to be investigated such as pulling Traditional Character dictionaries from Taiwan or Hong Kong and/or other sources and converting the characters. Regardless, the goal is to make a Chinese Dictionary for free culture that anyone may contribute to to make better. Hopefully, no sensitive words will be filtered either! NOTE: Please, if you know more about this and/or have resources which can disprove the need or corroborate the need for this project, please do post a comment on this post.

Then, just yesterday I met up with Prof. Wang Chunyan, who is public project lead of Creative Commons Mainland China, along with new buddy Zafka, Handong and Stephen from CC China. We discussed all things CC China, how great their 2nd Annual photo competition is going with some 2000 high quality entries thus far, their upcoming CC B-Day in December, and what are the rules for Chinese Public Domain Status of creative works. I will save that for another post, but sounds approximately like works are in the public domain prior to 1957 in China right now. Then, government documents, official news, legislation, case law, and all official translations are uncopyrightable, with one caveat. Uncopyrightable works must have a form of attribution to the government in the form of a legal citation.

Overall, great last few days increasing my guanxi points while all you guys are checking your twitterrank asking if you are the real spamking As I started to outline in a previous post, the main things I want to follow up on with this discussion of priorities is for us in FLOSS, Free Culture, and Autonomo.us worlds to develop a list of top 10 priorities for a year which give contributors nice goals to work on. I really wish a project (which I won’t name here publicly but has an i and c in the name) could have taken this on to catalyze development and collaboration between FREE communities as the FSF has modelled so well with their high priority project list. However, we (myself included) are not ones to sit on our haunches and wait for a list of priorities! We hack for fun and incentives!

If anyone finds this interesting, please do post up what you think are priority projects for FLOSS, Free Culture, and Autonomo.us Network Services. If you have insight into China, please post that as well. I will brew this some more and come up with some summary of some collective priorities for associated communities.

The other take away is that it sounds like this Chinese Dictionary project, unless some pre-established work is done on this, is a good new project to build up with my Chinese colleagues

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

@mlinksva just put out a great slide show, albeit the over-use of bullet points ;), that is an overview of CC as well as a general look at the historical trajectories of Free Software and how Free Culture Movement is approximately 10 years behind. This is a great beginning at the more intimate look at where WE are heading collectively, because of course, Free Software and Free Culture’s paths are intermingled. It would be quite interesting actually to write a book about these paths with major highlights and where WE are heading.

Yes, I know there are many books analyzing Free Software and then some coming out like David Bollier’s Viral Spiral that looks at Commons production overall including rise of Creative Commons, but actually one looking at the larger scope of Free Culture would be quite interesting.

Check out the slides and throw em up if you have any comments:

BTW, I wonder if we should collectively be working on a more finite conference about the Free Culture Movement for next year. This would be one targeted towards production of content, assessing failed projects, live events, and no eunuchs to assist in cultural production. The idea is that this conference would directly fit into the trajectory of Free Software. This conference would be in the optimal location globally for most people to attend for the least amount of expenditure, such as Amsterdam, Vancouver, Singapore, or a better optimized location. I think we can learn from Wikimania in Cairo and conferences in Sapporo as absurd for more than the usual suspects on the conference circuit (of which I am a part).

Free Culture Conference (”Get your FreeCon”) would be a meeting of specific projects to hash out interrelationships and collective trajectories for the coming year. We have had great success with the Libre Graphics Meeting which is not about people hand waving and armchair philosophizing about every single person’s movement, but specific projects coming together to their roadmap, challenges for interoperability, and real hacking on projects more than just declarations.

What would it take to put on a proper Free Culture Conference and who would need to be present. I would say:

Free Software Foundation
Creative Commons
Wikimedia Properties
Gnome Foundation
Open Courseware Consortium
Internet Archive

And the list keeps going on…please add to, as this is just off the head…the number of companies that would be interested in this intermixing would be quite high IMO. I’m particularly interested in this being a place for companies interested in Open Hardware and Specifications to intermingle (aka, Openmoko, VIA, Intel)

The idea is that this is a place where project roadmaps are compared, integrations resolved (like Wikipedia BY-SA compatibility), and real hacking would take place. Also, this conference would be 2-3 days max and marked with conversions of projects to more liberalized licensing as affirmations each day to pump up participants [0]. The goal of the event would be to produce actual statements showing resolutions with implementation to back them up, and to announce the next 5-10 free culture priorities for the year.

Is anyone interested in this?

[0] I’ve called this Freedom Day before, but it needs a better name without the negative associations with Freedom in many asian countries - aka, freedom means free as in destroy the government, which this is NOT. Rather, the idea of Freedom Day would be for projects to announce using free licenses and/or moving from more restrictive licenses to more free licenses. What would a better name for this annual day be? What about SHARING DAY, or Global Day of Sharing