There are two large events in early October related to open cultural archives and sustainability of the cultural commons. Both of these should be a potent convergence of international talents assessing the vanguard of open culture.
The first is the Open Video Conference, a massive shin dig of programmers, video artists, hackers, theorists, and economists alighting in New York this coming weekend. Here’s how the site describes it: The Open Video Conference (OVC) is a multi-day summit of thought leaders in business, academia, art, and activism to explore the future of online video. OVC is a showcase for technical and creative innovation in online video. But the Open Video Conference transcends technical details and grapples with some larger questions:
- With so much free stuff out there, how will creators get paid?
- Do we need to change the rules of copyright?
- Who decides what you watch?
- Who knows what you watch?
- Is online video a force for good? Or is there just too much weird stuff out there?
The conference features panels and workshops on HTML 5, the new standard that integrates support for video on the web, on Burning Man vs. the EFF over media privacy, on Metavid‘s hacks of C-SPAN’s public domain government video, on crowdsourcing an edit of Star Wars, on theories about remix culture, and transmedia storytelling.
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The second is the 3rd Free Culture Research Conference on October 8-9 in Berlin, a project jointly hosted by the Free University of Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, COMMUNIA, and Wikimedia Germany. The event derives from a similar workshop held at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard in 2009.
The event’s tagline is part-question: ‘Free Culture between Commons and Markets: Approaching the Hybrid Economy?’ The Conference aims “to chart the future of Free Culture,” a movement “enabled by new Internet technologies and innovative legal solutions (and that) prospers in the form of new business models and via commons-based peer production, thereby both challenging and complementing classic market institutions.”
Themes include:
- Studies on the use and growth of open/free licensing models
- Critical analyses of the role of Creative Commons or similar models
- The role of Free Culture in markets, industry, government, or the non-profit sector
- Technical, legal or business solutions towards a hybrid economy
- Incentives, innovation and community dynamics in open collaborative peer production
- Economic models for the sustainability of commons-based production
- The economic value of the public domain
- Business models and the public domain
- 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 with global lessons
- Best practices from open/free licensing, and the application of different business and organizational models by specific communities or individuals
- Definitions of openness and freedom for different media types, users and communities
- Broader economic, sociopolitical, legal or cultural implications of Free Culture initiatives and peer production practices
- Methodological concerns in the study of Free Culture
And coinciding with the conference is a one day workshop on 7 October on open bibliographic data and the public domain. Topics will include the role of freely reusable metadata to calculate which works are in the public domains in different jurisdictions, the future of open bibliographic data and what services people would like to see (e.g. using data as a backbone for new kinds of research tools in digital humanities or representing data on maps and timelines), and how to represent different levels of granularity in the metadata: eg. different parts of a book might not be protected equally (literary content versus images).