Tag Archive for 'opencontent'

OCWC Conference in Dalian 2008 and Beijing

Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China
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!

Thanks to the Fedora Project, LGM Goal Met

I wanted to send a big thank you out to The Fedora Project, Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg for their support of the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland, May 8 - 11!

Dave Neary wrote a good overview of the state of the massively successful fundraiser we put together with Pledgie.com (try it out if you want to raise money for your cause!).

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 :)

We Need Your Help LGM2008 to Raise Rest of 10K

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

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.

Blender Open Source Movie Premiere and Panel on Economies of the Commons in Amsterdam

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:

Character from http://bigbuckbunny.org

If you haven’t been to Amsterdam or checked out what great work Paul Keller 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:

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 ;)

W3b Sk1llz Day 2 at Zhongshan University on Creative Commons and Style as in Sheets

BTW, here are the slides from Day 1.

CC LiveContent 2.0 Beta Testing

Don’t forget to download the new Creative Commons LiveContent 2.0 disc, burn-it, test it out, and file some bugs! There is a quick turnaround on the disc, but the build process is automated now so hopefully testing and packaging will be much simpler and ongoing. TVOL wrote:

LiveContent 2.0 cover

A beta of LiveContent 2.0 is available for testing! We’ve got it up at the CC labs site (direct download) and the Fedora Spins site (torrent). Burn the DVD image to a disc and boot it up. The Creative Commons tech team has been working on an interesting content “autocuration” process for LiveContent 2.0, which automatically pulls down CC-licensed media for inclusion on the LiveDVD. Our test run is with Flickr, so check out the autocurated images from the popular photo sharing site right on the LiveContent desktop. A focus of LiveContent 2.0 is to foster the standardization of content APIs, thus allowing LiveContent (and other media projects!) to draw from CC-licensed feeds straight from the Content Directories. Check out the tech specs on Flickr’s API and look for more documentation soon about CC’s process.

This test build also contains some amazing photos from Wikimedia Commons’ Pictures of the Year. You can have your CC-licensed project featured on the disc too. We’re moving quickly with this, so hit us up with ideas for content you feel could be included. Check out the wiki page to add specific content ideas.

If you’re able to help test the LiveDVD functionality, please help us report bugs, file feature requests and submit patches at the CC SourceForge tracking page. Please provide as much information as you can, including the build number and the type of machine you’re running it on.

Once again, we thank the generous folks over at Worldlabel.com for supporting this project and helping to push for better standardization, making LiveContent an interesting tool and providing a necessary nudge toward easier content sharing. Thanks also to Fedora Project for the testing and hosting space.

LiveContent boots into Fedora 8 and runs directly from the LiveDVD. The multimedia content can also be viewed without booting into the LiveDVD. Here’s more information on burning an ISO and running a LiveDVD.

Wikipedia: List of ISO image software
wikiHow: How to Burn ISO Files to DVD

On a personal note, TVOL, Alex and Asheesh have done a fabulous job pulling together LC 2.0. It furthers my obsessions with promoting open content standards so that we can get media into all of our free and open source media players quick and easily.

Geez, my blog is a presss release blog nearly of all the projects that control my life :)

Today is Public Domain Day!

Open Clip Art Library is helping celebreate Public Domain Day!!! All content submitted to the Open Clip Art Library is dedicated into the public domain! Hooray!!! As a community, we need to look at Creative Commons new CC0 project and figure out how to migrate to this once released hopefully in mid-January. Here is more from the original post:

January 1st is Public Domain Day, as noted by copyrightwatch.ca:

Welcome to 2008, and let’s welcome into the Public Domain thousands, indeed millions, of creative works from the collective cultural past of our little planet and its many countries. Yes, it’s January 1st, Public Domain Day in most countries of the world, where copyright runs from the death of the author of a work until the end of the 50th, 70th, or some other year thereafter.

Read the whole post for some notable works falling into the public domain in some jurisdictions.

Everybody’s Libraries also has an informative post about Public Domain Day 2008.

A post from Lessig on Public Domain Day 2004.

The microformats community jumped the gun, announcing a transition of their wiki to the public domain a few days ago.

Creative Commons offers a public domain dedication and we’ve announced that we’ll be upgrading and extending that this year with the CC0 project.

Via Boing Boing.