Blender
Bricolabs
Creative Labour
Dyne.org
Edufactory
Floss Manuals
freeDimensional Network
Genderchangers
GOTO10
Microvolunteerism
MyCreativity
Upgrade!
coordinator: Ton Roosendaal
extract from site:
“The Blender Foundation is an independent organisation (a Dutch “stichting”), acting as a non-profit public benefit corporation, with the following goals:
* To establish services for active users and developers of Blender
* To maintain and improve the current Blender product via a public accessible source code system under the GNU GPL license
* To establish funding or revenue mechanisms that serve the foundation’s goals and cover the foundation’s expenses
* To give the worldwide Internet community access to 3D technology in general, with Blender as a core
* To facilitate the open source Blender projects.
Blender is an open source software package for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, and gaming. Initially developed by Ton Roosendaal’s company NaN in the Netherlands, its popularity, and capabilites, have grown over the years. There is a large and active user base with ongoing development by dedicated hackers, making Blender a powerful and viable 3D software solution.”
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Bricolabs
http://bricolabs.net
coordinator: Rob van Kranenburg
A distributed network for global and local development of generic infrastructures incrementally developed by communities.
A global platform to investigate the new loop of open content, software and hardware for community applications, bringing people together with new technologies and distributed connectivity, unlike the dominant focus of IT industry on security, surveillance and monopoly of information and infrastructures.
At the moment we are discussing organizational protocols and creating a set of HOWTOs and WHYTOs, so this website is in a development stage in which people that feel related to the spirit of the project are very welcome to join us. The most alive space of our project is currently the mailing list.
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coordinator: Valery Alzaga
Creative Labour is an offshoot of the Euromayday network, a predominantly European network that mobilizes around the first of may as a day to reclaim rights for the new generations growing up under a new, flexible labour regime and in a European context where welfare entitlements are on the decline.
Some of the main groups involved in the early beginnings of Euromayday, such as the Intermittents in Paris, the Chainworkers in Milano and Yomango in Barcelona, have in the past years been organising around issues of Creative Labour. The Intermittents staging an impressive nation wide campaign around the rights of cultural workers, Chainworkers with their project Serpica Naro dramatically intervening in the Milan Fashion Week, and Yomango and their related projects working on issues of property. Now that the urgency of the 1st of May street mobilisations has become less pronounced, different networks have deepened their commitment to local intervention, addressing broad issues around contemporary forms of labour. Creative labour is one of the core issues where groups are working on.
In the near future, the aim of the Creative Labour network is to give more centrality to the question of labour conditions and contestation in the discussion around creativity and the knowledge economy, building on different local experiences that have s o far had little international coordination offline. Next to that, of course, the network will to continue to be active on a broad array of activities, that have come to define a European creative undercurrent in socio-economic political thought and activism, and a source of radical innovation.
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coordinator: Denis “Jaromil” Rojo
Dyne.org appeared online in 2000 when the HasciiCam software was published: an invention widely appreciated for its artistic value and for making possible to broadcast live video using old hardware from a slow network connection.
Inspired by a mix of software and poetry, a growing network of developers released to the public software made to insure freedom of expression, configuring dyne.org as a free software atelier, a portal to Digital Creation and Media Art.
Ranging from radio makers, humanitarian organizations, video artists, medical researchers, media activists and educators, a large amount of people employed and redistributed dyne.org software worldwide, free of charge, echoing to the freedom spirit of this autonomous initiative.
Despite the fact in its early days (and until now) dyne.org was never boosted with merchandising or money, several young hackers pioneered the constitution of a wide horizontal network. Openness, knowledge sharing and freedom of creation have been the philosophical principles guiding the evolution of dyne.org, hosting creations that have been conceptualised not for a profit, but for their role within society.
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Edufactory
http://www.edu-factory.org/
coordinator: Brett Neilson / Matteo Pasquinelli
Edu-factory is a transnational mailing-list for discussion of transformations to the university, the production of knowledge and forms of conflict (edufactory@listcultures.org). About 500 militants, students and researchers have participated since the beginning of 2007. Rejecting the notion that networks necessarily institute horizontal and spontaneous relations, we proceed with the view that networks must be organized if they are to operate as political spaces. The model has involved two temporally circumscribed and thematically identified rounds of discussion: the first on conflicts in the production of knowledge and the second on hierarchisation of the market for education and the construction of autonomous institutions. After each round of discussion, the list closes to await a new opening in a successive cycle. In this way, edu-factory moves from an extensive to an intensive mode of organizing networks.
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Floss Manuals
http://en.flossmanuals.net/
coordinator: Adam Hyde
FLOSS Manuals make free software more accessible by providing clear documentation that accurately explains their purpose and use. Each manual explains what the software does and what it doesn’t do, what the interface looks like, how to install it, how to set the most basic configuration necessary, and how to use its main functions. To ensure the information remains useful and up to date the manuals are regularly developed to add more advanced uses, and to document changes and new versions of the software.
The manuals on FLOSS Manuals are written by a community of people, who do a variety of things to keep the manuals as up to date and accurate as possible. Anyone can contribute to a manual – to fix a spelling mistake, to add a more detailed explanation, to write a new chapter, or to start a whole new manual. The way in which FLOSS Manuals are written mirrors the way in which FLOSS (Free, libre open source) software itself is written: by a community who contribute to and maintain the content.
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freeDimensional Network
http://www.freedimensional.org/
coordinator: Todd Lester
fD is a network of community art spaces, which as a whole acts as an incubator for practical, creative solutions to contemporary human rights issues. The freeDimensional network was born of a dilemma: the need for accommodation experienced by culture workers-in-distress. Therefore, fD developed a system to partner residential artist communities with human rights organizations in order to facilitate rapid response safe haven and related services. Since 2005, freeDimensional has recruited approximately 50 community art spaces on five continents into a horizontal network for this purpose. During this period, fD has supported over 30 journalists (print, publishing, cartoon/caricature), artists (novelists, poets, painters, filmmakers, musicians), and activists (advocating for prison reform, environment, transparency, LGBT rights, youth engagement, ethnic self-determination) from over 20 countries with this service.
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Genderchangers
http://genderchangers.org/
coordinator: Donna Metzlar
Genderchangers was initiated in 1999 in the ASCII hacklab in Amsterdam as a network for women, technology and freedom of information. Its first activities were knowledge-sharing courses provided by women, for women. Through the enthusiastic response to these early local activities (workshops and courses), the idea of an annual international meeting/event called the Eclectic Tech Carnival (/etc) was borne, and this event has successfully taken place each year since 2002.
Both Genderchangers and the /etc are organised or not organised in a collective and non-hierarchical manner, with locally-autonomous branches. Most activities depend on someone coming up with the idea and finding the will and support to implement it.
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coordinator: Aymeric Mansoux
GOTO10 is an international collective of artists, focussed on the new artistic practices linked to the integration of open networks and free culture in digital arts.
The group is distributed and self-organised. In GOTO10, circularity, heterarchy and lazy consensus are key in the development and sustain-ability of projects. The collective sets itself as a decentralised laboratory and creative sandbox in which numerous projects and experiments are explored. This form of research is led freely and spontaneously, while at the same time, symbiotic relationship are encouraged with other groups, organisations, institutions and networks around the world.
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Microvolunteerism
http://www.microvolunteerism.org
coordinator: Melanie Rieback
The Microvolunteerism Project is a fresh and exiting new international network dedicated to creating both a technological and social framework for the crowdsourcing of volunteer work.
In terms of technology, we are creating an open-source SW based platform that facilitates the distribution of project management work (at all levels), and that enables the creation of small well-defined bits of both technical and nontechnical project work, that we call “Microprojects”. We then allow volunteers to create social profiles (skills, interests), and apply Semantic searching and recommendation algorithms to match bits of project work to individual volunteers. Our SW platform also supports granular volunteer contribution tracking, and will have to deal with decentralization/distribution and security/privacy issues.
Socially-speaking, we are trying to build a community of both not-for-profit projects and volunteers. The formation of such communities will allow us to create a “skill sharing” system, that will allow both people and organizations with a diverse pallet of skills to mutually support each other in complimentary ways. The Microvolunteerism community is supported by our SW project, but should ideally be able to thrive and interact independently of it.
The Microvolunteerism Project network, while recently formed, consists of combined clusters of people who have worked together for a longer period of time. Members our network have been also active in one (or more) of these projects:
– Stakeholder Democracy Network (2004)
– RFID Guardian Project (2004)
– Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner (2008)
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MyCreativity
http://www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity/
coordinator: Bas van Heur
A network of researchers, artists, activists and policy-makers that critically engage with the creative industries field.
On November 16-18, 2006 the Institute of Network Cultures and the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster organized MyCreativity, a Convention on International Creative Industries research. MyCreativity was a two-day conference that brought the trends and tendencies around the Creative Industries into critical question. It sought to address the local, intra-regional and trans-national variations that constitute international creative industries as an uneven field of actors, interests and conditions. The conference explored a range of key topics that, in the majority of cases, remain invisible to both academic research and policy-making in the creative industries.
The international conference was seen as preliminary to the network and mainly offered a space in which those critical of the creative industries rhetoric could come together and discuss, as well as a platform through which they could be heard.
Following this conference, actors involved in the MyCreativity network have started and/or collaborated in a number of projects worldwide that continue this critical engagement with the creative industries. Present and future attention should focus on the development of organized networks able to intervene in ongoing debates and shape the creative industries in more sustainable ways.
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Upgrade!
http://www.theupgrade.net/
coordinator: Kyd Campbell
An ever-growing network, upwards of 30 nodes at present time, started in 1999 in NYC. Mandate: Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique, and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers bi-annually in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year.
Past goals have been to grow the network and add new nodes all across the world. Present goals include to create cross-network collaborations and improve our online tools. Future perspectives include discovering our need for “organization” and finding out how to sustain the network.
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