still/open

seth keen, a lecturer from rmit who attended the melbourne still/open workshop, directed me to a video recording of a lecture delivered by shaun miller a senior lawyer from the firm marshalls and dent to first year media students. might be of interest to some of you.

copyright, delivered as part of the networked media course, media department, rmit university, august 6, 2007. Copyright shaun miller. licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 australia license.

thanks seth ^_^

These are the notes I took down from my perspective as we presented our group work in the Alessandro Ludovico workshop. Our group handled the content aspect of hypothetical open source publication. We discussed the group making comments on these notes as there was plenty more discussed in the session that my be quite different form what I write here:

What it is about? Face to global is the title of the publication. The sub-heading for the publication “Source to Openness”. The concept for the idea comes from previous publication examples ‘Factsheet’ and ‘Whole Earth’ that Alessandro mentioned in his presentation. The publication is a directory for all things ‘open source‘ starting at the local level. This is what is happening in your neighbourhood from free wireless, free software development through to community based activities like ‘mothers groups’ who act as type of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. These groups as an example are voluntary brought together to network, socialise and share knowledge about raising a child. This is specialist knowledge that cuts through all the plethora of books and literature on the subject. The conversations in these groups are about editing this knowledge through hands on experience. ‘Face to global’ provides an index and reviews all these activities occurring locally. Activities are mapped and can be viewed electronically via social software. A theoretical influence “Think Global and Act Local”. The publication in hardcopy format or as a softcopy pdf, from front to back, starts local and progresses to global. Working with the ‘mute’ idea of being able to re-edit your own publication from existing content each location has the potential to assemble a publication that starts local and moves to specific global interests. With the editorial there would be differing forms of editorial overview applied to the varying types of publication that emerge from the content. An aspect of this approach would be to facilitate specialist publications like from the mothers group for example. Other publications could be edited from user-generated content that is collected through some type of social software. Each distributed in varying ways using for example print-on-demand for hardcopy output where the idea is to distribute tangible real paper publications back into the community. Like Brewster Kahle with his Internet Bookmobile these could be printed on street corners on demand.

My interest in the still/open workshop is motivated by both my teaching and PhD research, with particular focus on a couple of projects that I am currently developing. The first is the Video Vortex conference that I have been working on as a principal researcher with the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) in Amsterdam. Video Vortex focuses on how video is potentially being used on the Internet and critically analyses from an alternative perspective social media websites like YouTube and video blogs. The second project is videodefunct which is an experimental work that explores a hybrid form of video blog. Currently, as a work-in-progress, a number of prototypes are being developed in the open source blog publishing system WordPress. In a broader context this critical analysis of online video practice supports my teaching in the Internet based subjects Networked Media and Integrated Media, in the Media department at RMIT.

Open source as a concept in these activities extends beyond the area of software with important connections into ideologies being explored around copyright as part of ‘free culture’ initiatives and peer-to-peer alternatives. I am interested in examining the notion of what it means to operate, produce and share in an ‘open’ process, through a critical analysis that investigates these “modes of thinking” from varying perspectives.