rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

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.

Previously: commons-research list announced.

UPDATE and NOTE: This is a year old post, so its not up-to-date…oops…clearing the queue…The original post is here.

I’ve been trying to come up with unconventional ways to raise money for the small non-profit. Yesterday, someone decided to auction off their old web domain and give 90% of the money to Creative Commons. So, I started to think about all the code that is sitting on developers’ shelves, old domains, etc. I wonder if other developers would consider auctioning off domain names, old code, etc, and or just outright donating old code, domain names, etc. to Creative Commons. This code would get licensed so that it would be Open Source and I would even take the time to make a place for it that would be visible and accessible.

Does anyone have any code, failed or sleeping dot.com projects, and/or domain names they would like to donate to CC? CC could then decide what to do with these (auction, put online, developer further, etc). From the likes of the domain name auctions on Ebay, this is a great way to raise funds. However, I’m quite surprised that not more people are trying to sell their code on-line on ebay.

Also, I just now started to wonder about how to apply the similar logic of fundraising of naming certain properties after people, for the web. Like, how much of a donation would it take to get certain tools, sections of a website, or campaigns named after donors?

Maybe I should try this for my site. I could name my next open source tool after someone, for a donation of $1000 USD. Hmmm…maybe I should rename an old project if anyone is interested in this Ideally, also, the name would just be a name and the code would all stay as open source.

What other unconventional tactics can other people think of that would help CC or any nonprofit in the world, raise money to stay in operation? What new possibilities are there? So much time and money is spent on adapting and revolutionizing business, but what about simple nonprofit operations like fundraising?

Russell, from worldlabel.com, is a great guy. He has helped support Open Clip Art Library and is sponsoring the CC LiveContent project that tvol (Timothy Vollmer), tannewt (Scott Shawcroft), bovinity (Alex Roberts), paulproteus (Asheesh Laroia, and rrrojer (Rebecca Rojer) have all touched in some way. Russell has started a blog, and he posted this great item today:

First, an abandoned 12-week-old macaque develops a friendship with a white pigeon in China…read more.

Then, as reported by Reuters news, Washington Post and other major news media outlets, A lonely baboon in a private Lithuanian zoo has adopted a chicken he saved from certain death last month and the two have formed a fast friendship. Watch the baboon take care of his new friend.