The Economies of the Commons II conference critically examines the economics of on-line public domain and open access cultural resources, also known as the digital commons. While proponents praise these resources for their low-cost barriers, accessibility and collaborative structures, critics claim they undermine established (proprietary) production without offering a viable business strategy of their own.

Because the sustainability of open content resources remains unclear, this conference explores alternative revenue models and novel institutional structures that can fund and safeguard these materials. What new hybrid solutions for archiving, preserving and retrieval can both create viable markets and serve the public interest in a competitive global 21st century information economy? How should we restructure the economic frameworks in which content producers and cultural archives operate?

This event seeks to connect researchers, theorists, economists and activists in order to analyze the political economy of open content and its consequences for the cultural sector.

CONFERENCE THEMES:

Friday November 12
Keynote Address: Charlotte Hess
Critique of the ‘Free and Open’
Pro-Active Archives
Book Launch Dymitri Kleiner
The Future of the Public Domain

Saturday November 13
Revenue Models
Open Content Tools and Technology
Materiality and Sustainability of Information, Knowledge, and Culture
The Best of the OxCars

Conference Schedule

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 12

Venue: De Balie, Amsterdam

Coffee/ door open

10.30 – 11.00

Opening and Welcome

11.00 – 11.15
At the opening of the Economies of the Commons II festival-chair Eric Kluitenberg will explain the two-year legacy of this event and what is going to happen the next two days.

Conference Keynote Address

11.15 – 12.00

Charlotte Hess, Syracuse University
Charlotte Hess is Associate Dean for Research, Collections and Scholarly Communication at Syracuse University Library where she is an advocate and spokesperson for the knowledge commons, open access and the mindful collection, organization, distribution and preservation of the cultural and scholarly record. Before going to Syracuse in 2008, Hess was at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University and the founder and director of the Digital Library of the Commons (1999-2008). She served on the Executive Council of the International Association for the Study of the Commons as the Information Officer 1997- 2009. Hess has written and lectured extensively on the knowledge commons and more recently on new commons. She has collaborated with Elinor Ostrom on works including “Private and Common Property Rights,” 2008. Encyclopedia of Law & Economics. E. Elgar. (abstract); “A Framework for Analyzing the Microbiological Commons.” 2007. International Social Science Journal 58(188):336-349; “Ideas, Facilities, and Artifacts: Information as a Common-Pool Resource” 2003. Law and Contemporary Problems 66(1-2) (article here) and their 2007 book, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. MIT Press.

Invited Respondents
12.00 – 12.30
Joost Poort, SEO Economic Researcher on the market structure and regulation of infrastructures
http://www.seo.nl/

Syb Groeneveld, Independent expert for the European Commission (ICT, Media & Society, eInclusion) and representative for Creative Commons International to introduce CC licenses in the Russian Federation.

Lunch
12.30 – 13.30

Critique of the ‘Free and Open’

13.30 – 15.30

“Content for all, revenues for some.” For this session we explore the theory behind terms and terminologies. What do the terms ‘free’ and ‘open’ mean in their current contexts? How are they used and in what new political condition do they gain resonance? What is open, how open is it, and for whom? Can anything be learned by reconsidering the work of the grand master of openness as a political concept, Karl Popper? Or are there historical examples of open societies and the commons we can draw from to answer these questions? How do we situate unpaid, crowd-sourced content made profitable by companies such as Google in relation to freedom and openness? We should nuance the definition of data or information, asking whether it comes from open archives versus audiovisual material from emerging artists, established reporters or other cultural producers. Is a resource still open if a user’s attention to it is then sold to advertisers? Indeed, is openness an absolute (either/or) concept, is does it make sense to think of openness as a scale? Alternatively, is it possible to develop an ethics of closure? There is no way back to the old intellectual property rights regimes. But how then are cultural producers going to make a living? How can we create sustainable sources of income for the ‘digital natives’? How can we reconcile the now diverging interests of professionals and amateurs?

Speakers
Yann Moulier Boutang, University of Technology of Compiègne, editor of Quarterly French Review MULTITUDES.
Sustainablility of Free and Open: from Terra Nullius to the new Commons
A comparison can be made between the former commons before the application of the terra nullius principle of european colonization and enclosures of primitive accumulation in Western countries and the new commons of the digital era. Like the public sector, the open source and free movement are yielding for free positive externalities to market economy without the ressources granted by state. Unless you tackle with the revenu issue, like the copyleft movement or the Creatives commons licences, the model has to be highly funded through private sponsorship or public subvention with all the disadvantages in terms of freedom. Economic sustainability of the new commons is a crucial political issue.

Dymitri Kleiner, author of Telekommunist Manifesto
http://www.telekommunisten.net/
The Telekommunist Manifesto
The Telekommunist Manifesto is an exploration of class conflict and property, born in the realization of the primacy of economic capacity in social struggles. Emphasis is placed on the distribution of productive assets and their output. The interpretation here is always tethered to the understanding that wealth and power are intrinsically linked, and only through the former can the later be achieved. As a collective of intellectual workers, the work of Telekommunisten is very much rooted in the free software and free culture communities. However, a central premise of this Manifesto is that engaging in software development and the production of immaterial cultural works is not enough. The communization of immaterial property alone cannot change the distribution of material productive assets, and therefore cannot eliminate exploitation, only workers self-organization of production can.

Simona Levi is a multidisciplinary artist born in Italy and established in Barcelona since 1990. She is the Director of Conservas, a cultural activity centre. Since 2000, she has directed the arts festival INn MOTION which takes place at the Centre of Contemporary Culture of the city of Barcelona. She is an outstanding activist in European social movements in the area of free circulation of knowledge and the right to housing. She is also involved in several artistic and activist platforms. She is co-founder of EXGAE, a civil organization that defends from the abuses of the cultural industry trade groups.
http://fcforum.net/

Nate Tkacz, Melbourne University
Death Knell for Open Politics
Openness has become the master category of politics in network cultures. Whereas recent instantiations of the open cannot be understood without reference to 80s software cultures, the idea of openness extends beyond this specific context: Openness has a history. Most famously, it was mobilised by Karl Popper as a critique of totalitarian knowledge and to justify market organisation and the related (neo)liberal disposition. In this presentation I make some critical observations regarding the function of openness both in contemporary network cultures and in the writings of Popper. By placing these distinct but related iterations in dialogue, I hope to point out that there is much more at stake in the battle for openness than its mere realisation.
http://nathanieltkacz.net/

Moderator:
Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007).
http://networkcultures.org/

Pro-Active Archives

15.45 – 17.30

Creating an open repository of digital cultural artifacts is a valuable start, but then the question remains, what will users do with this content? This panel seeks to answer how an active audience can be involved in online cultural material. How can institutions involve audiences in sharing describing, reviewing, tagging, and especially reusing the digital commons? How can audience make use of these resources in a meaningful way? What kinds of licenses should institutions require, and how might the artists themselves feel about having their materials available online? This panel will be part show-and-tell, part discussion of best practices, as curators, scholars and directors of cultural institutions explain how they promote engagement and creative re-use of online collections.

Speakers

Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution and Smithsonian Commons
The Smithsonian Commons
The Smithsonian Commons will be dedicated to the free and unrestricted sharing of Smithsonian resources and encouraging new kinds of learning and creation through interaction with Smithsonian research, collections, and communities. The initial Smithsonian Commons will be a Web site (also designed for mobile devices) featuring collections of digital assets contributed voluntarily by the units and presented through a platform that provides best-of-class search and navigation; social tools such as commenting, recommending, tagging, collecting, and sharing; and intellectual-property permissions that clearly give users the right to use, re-use, share, and innovate with our content without unnecessary restrictions. The architecture of the Smithsonian Commons will encourage the discovery of content deep within Smithsonian unit Web sites and will expose connections and commonalities across Smithsonian projects. The Smithsonian Commons will also be a platform for formal and informal collaboration and content sharing inside and outside the Institution.
http://www.si.edu/commons/prototype/

Sandra Fauconnier, Collection, Netherlands Media Art Institute
NIMk: Mediating Media Art
Since its foundation in 1978, the Netherlands Media Art Institute has assembled an extensive distribution collection of video and media art. It comprises more than 2,000 works at present, varying from the earliest video art experiments through recent media art productions by more than 500 Dutch, international artists and rising talents. NIMk also manages the video collections of the De Appel Foundation, the Lijnbaan Center in Rotterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN). The video art collections of other Dutch museums and institutes, including the Groninger Museum and the Kröller Müller Museum are preserved and in some cases made accessible by NIMk. In making its collection accessible online, and as an intermediary for media art, NIMk adopts a pragmatic attitude when dealing with tensions between openness, publicness, ethical choices, copyright and accessibility. We attempt to balance artists’ and the public interest. For makers, an important question at this moment deals with the new role of distribution and new business models: how to generate a sustainable income when artistic production, promotion and distribution go digital? Makers adopt many different positions in this discussion, from extremely protective to totally open. For the public interest, a healthy, rich and qualitative public domain is at stake. NIMk defends both interests, which it actively tries to balance and reconcile, with a strong and prominent mission towards accessibility.
http://www.nimk.nl
http://catalogue.nimk.nl
http://gama-gateway.eu

Michael Murtaugh, writer, web designer, and creator of the Active Archives
Active Archives
Creating web pages and displaying information on-line has become easier and easier for non-expert users. The Active Archives project starts from the observation that most of the interesting cultural archives that have been developed over the last few years have taken advantage of those new facilities for instant publishing, but mostly in the form of websites that mirror regular information brochures, announcements and text-publishing. Often, they are conceived as “We” give information to “You”. Within Active Archives, we aim to set up multi-directional communication channels, and are interested in making information circulate back and forth. We would like to give material away and receive it transformed: enriched by different connections, contexts and contradictions.
http://www.activearchives.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.automatist.org/

Annelies Termeer, Coordinator of Celluloid Remix at EYE Film Instituut Netherlands
Celluloid Remix
Celluloid Remix is an online video remix contest organized by EYE Film Institute Netherlands and Images for the Future. The first edition ran from April to September 2009. For this contest, EYE made a selection of 21 film fragments from the Dutch Early Cinema collection (1917-1932) available for creative reuse. These films had been restored and digitized as part of the Images for the Future project. Participants in Celluloid Remix were asked to use the available film clips to create their vision of ‘modern times’ and shape it into a creative motion production. EYE collaborated on the project with art schools, festivals artists, and VJ’s. Ever since Images for the Future took off in 2007, much effort has been put into its infrastructure. From its backbone of data centres to trained personnel–much of this work has been as valuable as it is invisible. In the end, however, audiovisual heritage is only of true value when it is accessible for people who can use (and reuse) it as they choose. Celluloid Remix tried to achieve just that.

Moderator:
Eric Kluitenberg is a theorist, writer, and organiser on culture, media and technology. He is head of the media program at De Balie – Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam. He lectures and publishes regularly on culture, new media, and cultural politics throughout Europe and beyond. Previously, he taught courses on “Culture and New Media” at the Institute for Interactive Media, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, and at the University of Amsterdam, “Media Theory” for the post-graduate education programs in art & design and new media at Media-GN / Frank Mohr Institute and Academy Minerva in Groningen, the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, and worked on the scientific staff of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
http://www.debalie.nl

Book launch, Telecommunist Manifesto by Dymitri Kleiner

19.30 – 20.15

In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a key contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of cultural production and economic distribution. Proposing ‘venture communism’ as a new model for workers’ self-organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels’ seminal Manifesto of the Communist Party into the age of the internet. As a peer-to-peer model, venture communism allocates capital that is critically needed to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of free culture and free networks. In developing the concept of venture communism, Kleiner provides a critique of copyright regimes, and current liberal views of free software and free culture which seek to trap culture within capitalism. Kleiner proposes copyfarleft, and provides a usable model of a Peer Production License. Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential of the internet for a truly free society, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a political-conceptual call to arms in the fight against capitalism.

Public Debate: Future of the Public Domain in Europe

20.30– 22.30

A public debate about the future of the public domain in Europe and the role of evolving media and information infrastructures. The public domain can best be understood as the space of shared information, knowledge and communication resources that allow citizens free access to knowledge, ideas, and cultural expressions, as well as the means for discussing and sharing them. A thriving public domain is of vital importance for the democratic development of society, the free exchange of ideas and opinions, and thereby for the innovative power of society to find new solutions for emerging challenges.  The public domain is always a contested area, where different social actors assume their role in shaping its future. Public institutions have traditionally understood their role as central to the constitution of the public domain, alongside civic initiatives and interests, as the public domain offers the space for common and shared insights, ideas and expressions that create the cultural and social context, the ‘glue’ of society.  It is curious that while an ever increasing percentage of the European population gets their access to information, cultural expressions, and communication resources via networked media / the internet, public institutions perform only a marginal role in providing this access. While the public domain should be considered as complementary to that of the market the responsibility for digital and on-line access to information, expression and communication is left almost entirely to private actors.  In pluralist societies public institutions, including governments, have a clear responsibility for the public domain. In the view of Dutch media and cultural sociologist Wim Knulst these public institutions should ‘guarantee the diversity and quality of the public offering of information, expression and communication’ [1] This succinct formula, drafted in 1990 in view of an ever changing media and demographic context for cultural policies, is still perfectly apt today. Recent initiatives such as the Manifesto for the Public Domain have addressed this responsibility anew [2]. Our question is how this responsibility for the digital public domain will be filled in the immediate future?

Speakers
James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. He is the author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, and Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and Construction of the Information Society. He is the co-author of Bound By Law (Duke U.P. 2008), an educational comic book on fair use, and is the editor of Critical Legal Studies (Dartmouth/NYU Press (1994), Collected Papers on the Public Domain (Duke: L&CP 2003), and the co-editor of Cultural Environmentalism @ 10 (with Larry Lessig). He currently writes as an online columnist for the Financial Times’ New Economy Policy Forum. He was one of the original board members of Creative Commons and was also a co-founder of Science Commons, which aims to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data.
http://james-boyle.com/

Bas Savenije is Director General of the Dutch Royal Library, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, in the Netherlands. Before this, starting in 1994 he was university librarian, managing the comprehensive library of Utrecht University. He has initiated an extensive innovation program in the library, including the development of services for academic e-publishing. As a result of this Utrecht University Library now includes the unit Igitur, Utrecht Publishing & Archiving Services. Bas has published on the management of higher education, library innovation and the innovation of scientific communication.
http://www.kb.nl/

Lucie Guibault is assistant professor of copyright and intellectual property law at the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Born and raised in Canada, she studied law at the Université de Montréal [LL.B. (1988) and LL.M. (1995)] and recently received her doctorate from the University of Amsterdam, where she defended her thesis on Copyright Limitations and Contracts: An Analysis of the Contractual Overridability of Limitations on Copyright. Dr. Guibault is specialized in international and comparative copyright and intellectual property law. She is in charge of the coordination of the International Copyright Law Summer Course. She is also correspondent for Canada and the Netherlands for the German legal periodical Computer Law Review International.
http://www.ivir.nl/staff/guibault.html

Charlotte Hess, Syracuse University
http://library.syr.edu/about/people/staffbio/Hess_Charlotte.php

Moderator:
Paul Keller is copyright and social media expert. He is the national project lead for Creative Commons Netherlands, and he coordinates Knowledgeland’s copyright activities through the project Images for the Future. Paul also runs the license framework for the European culture portal Europeana.eu. Finally, and just as excitingly, Paul is the project manager for Digital Pioneers. Outside Knowledgeland, Paul is a member of the iCommons board, an international organisation that strives for a free, open access culture, open software and open education. Furthermore, Paul coordinates the contacts between Creative Commons and collective management organisations and is a member of the advice committee of Virtual Platform.
http://www.kennisland.nl

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 13

De Balie, Amsterdam

Revenue Models

10.00 – 12.30

In order for the public domain to be sustainable in the long run, appropriate revenue models are needed. Such models should support both the preservation of online repositories and the injection of newly created content into those repositories. In this session our aim is to construct the roles of stakeholders and protocols of a sustainable digital public domain. This will enable us to ask questions like: which revenue models can balance the growing costs of preserving digital cultural heritage, while unlocking it for a large audience? How can consumers participate in the distribution of culture while the integrity of the cultural products is somehow preserved? How to define the boundaries of a cultural product? Who retains the intellectual property of a collective work? Do interfaces like iTunes support the production or distribution of culture in the public domain? How can public/private partnerships bolster the digital commons?

Eelco Ferwerda has been involved in electronic publishing since 1995. He joined Amsterdam University Press in 2002 as Publisher of Digital Products and is responsible for all digital publications. Before joining AUP, he worked in various new media subsidiaries at the former Dutch newspaper publisher PCM, lastly as Manager Business Development for PCM Interactive Media. Ferwerda is the Project Manager of OAPEN and leads the work on its Open Access Publication model. He received the Dutch SURFshare Open Access award in recognition of his work for OAPEN. He is also President of the recently established Association of European University Presses.
http://www.oapen.org/xtf/home?brand=oapen, http://www.aup.nl/

Harry Verwayen. In his current position, Harry Verwayen is responsible for the development of the business of Europeana, an online collection of audio and visual culture. His main focus is the design and implementation of new business models that will support Europeana to fulfill its mission as “distributor, facilitator and innovator”. Prior to this Harry worked at the Amsterdam based think tank Knowledgeland where he was responsible for business model innovation in the cultural heritage sector. Harry holds a MA in History from Leiden University and has worked for over ten years in the scientific publishing industry.
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/

Jaromil. Originally trained as a linguist, Denis Roio is an artist, theorist and programmer who is currently based in Amsterdam. He is working as a researcher at the Netherlands Media Art Institute.Through his support for the development and distribution of free and open software, he tries to overcome existing restrictions and borders, whether economic, social or scientific. Taking an alternative stance to ‘profit and power’ oriented apparatuses, he is strongly engaged in building networks as a means of sharing tools—choosing to view knowledge as a dialogical and non-hierarchical process. By channelling personal insights into collaborative action, he shows a deep understanding for the problems of our time and possible solutions. (Transmediale 2009, Vilém Flusser Award, jury statement)
http://jaromil.dyne.org/

Marco Sachy (Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics, Rotterdam, NL). After he gained a BA in Philosophy of Language, Marco extended his academic interests toward the domain connecting Philosophy and Economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The master thesis that he successfully submitted is a philosophical assessment of the structural shortcomings emerging in the framework of a system exclusively implementing modern bank money. The result is a re-statement of the nature of money and the development of currency solutions for resilient and sustainable economies to obtain by virtue of an ecology of money. In particular, Marco focuses his research on Complementary Currencies as they have been theorised by currency architect Bernard Lietaer: they are agreements within a community to use something as a means of payment in parallel with conventional national currencies. In view of his Ph. D research, Marcoʼs attention is oriented toward Complementary Currencies systems that are deployed with FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software). Under these respects, the Commons of Money are Complementary Currencies.

Dolf Veenvliet is a 3D animated who studied at the KABK, Kunstakademiet i Trondheim, AKI, and got a degree as a ‘Monumental Artist’ in 1999. He also have several degrees in audio technique, am a certified Blender 3D educator, & W3C certified web developer. Nearly all designs he makes are released under the: creative commons attribution 3.0 license.
http://www.macouno.com/

Volker Grassmuck, Helmholtz Center for Cultural Technology of Humboldt University Berlin, and curator The Wizards of OS‰
The Sharing Licence and the new Social Contract on Culture
Brazil is about to introduce a copyright law bill on the Sharing Licence. Legalizing online file-sharing in exchange for a levy on broadband Internet access has been proposed under various names ever since P2P spread like wildfire. The Sharing Licence serves to end the ‘war on sharing’ and to establish a new form of collective reciprocal exchange between authors/artists and audiences. It will make everyone better off: It gives the collective audiences of creative works — of all works, not just those voluntary free-licensed by their authors — the freedom to copy and share. It gives the collectives of authors and performing artists a fair reward in proportion to the popularity of their works. It reserves a percentage of the levy pool for the support of not yet popular authors and of authors, (e.g. of contemporary classical music) who will never be popular but whose works the collective of authors and society deem important. All three effects directly improve diversity of culture, and they do so by improving access to works which is the prerequisite for the creation of new works.
http://www.vgrass.de/

Moderator:
Martijn Arnoldus specialises in the creative industries, particularly copyright and open content issues. As consultant, he has been pivotal to the majority of Knowledgeland’s projects on the creative economy since 2005. Martijn’s current work is around creative industry policy and entrepreneurship. Work in his in-tray ranges from requests for strategic advice to copyright problems to business models for creative entrepreneurs. As a senior consultant on open content licenses, Martijn is a member of the Creative Commons Netherlands project team and advises the Images for the Future consortium. He frequently advises public authorities, the educational and business sectors across all these areas, as well as researching and teaching at universities.
http://www.kennisland.nl

Lunch
12.30 – 13.30

Open Content, Tools and Technology

13.30 – 15.30

What infrastructures and institutions create and safeguard open access resources? ‘Open’ can be seen as a spectrum that ranges from audiovisual data from individual artists, to art, texts, and code from open access archives for hands on use, such as the Open Video Alliance. These are resources preserved and created by libraries, newspapers, magazine publishers, video producers, the general public (Wikipedia, YouTube), science and education communities, cultural organizations, professional creators, and youth. How do national and transnational initiatives paid for and accessible by the public, such as the UK and Dutch data commons and Europeana, push the agenda? Does their licensing framework set open standards? What other protocols, such as the semantic web, can these projects set? How are these projects hampered by legislation that does not exist in different national agendas, or are Balkanized by national interests? Topics include open codecs, open source tools, open publishing, open government data.

Speakers
Peter B.Kaufman (USA) President and Founder of Intelligent Television
Appreciating Audiovisual Value
Producers, media archivists, educators, and the public have new opportunities to make their media smarter and thereby more valuable and sustainable. In that light this presentation outlines some new forms of production, monetization, and educational use.
http://intelligenttelevision.com/

Ben Moskowitch is the general coordinator of the Open Video Alliance, a group of organizations and individuals committed to creating and promoting open technologies, policies, and practices in online video. He is the director of the Open Video Conference and leads the iCommons video policy project.
http://openvideoalliance.org/

Michael Dale, Open Media for Wikipedia
Technologies for Collaborative Archival Video
This talk will show two technology approaches to participatory open video archives. Algorithmic views of video metadata with user contributed annotations and collaborative authored video sequences. Metavid.org is a semantic video wiki that enables participants to ‘deep annotate’ archival video. This rich annotation system enables complex algorithmic views of the video archive. For example, give me a podcast of any time a female senator mentioning health care that received more than $100,000 from the pharmaceutical industry. Collaborative video sequencing has just recently started testing on Wikimedia commons. The video sequencer developed by Kaltura in collaboration with the Wikimedia foundation enables collaborative video editing. Sequences draw from freely licensed image, audio and video assets hosted in the Wikimedia commons. The resulting video sequences can then be used in Wikipedia articles to visually illustrate article concepts and content.
http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dale/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Media_Projects_Overview

Rufus Pollock is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and a Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation which he co-founded in 2004. He has worked extensively as a scholar and developer on the social, legal and technological issues related to the creation and sharing of knowledge.
http://okfn.org/

Moderator:
Morgan Currie is a researcher for the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. She completed her Masters degree in New Media at the University of Amsterdam, where her thesis explored how batch digitization of print collections is changing (and challenging) the traditional role of institutional libraries. Her research interests include digital archives, digital and open access publishing, and sustainability of the digital commons. Prior to her current position she worked for eight years as a researcher and producer of documentary films for American public television and GOOD Magazine.

Materiality and Sustainability of Culture

15.45 – 17.30

While digital reproduction is often touted as free, there are very real material and labor costs associated with the sustainability of digital objects beyond the first copy, including the hosting institutions and servers that manage artifacts. What are the critical costs behind the infrastructure of a digital cultural commons, and how does this differ from 20th century public broadcasting or archival models? How are we going to pay for continual distribution, preservation, and hosting of digital archives? This session will investigate these economic questions along with theoretical concerns for the reliability and authenticity of fragile digital data requiring refreshing and migration to new platforms over time.

Speakers
Jeff Ubois is currently exploring new approaches to personal archiving for Fujitsu Labs of America in Sunnyvale, California, and to video archiving for Intelligent Television and Thirteen/WNET in New York. Prior to these associations, Jeff was a staff research associate at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, where he investigated barriers to accessing television archives. For the Internet Archive, Jeff has worked on managing orphan works, maintaining archival integrity, and managing the collection and retention of digital library usage data. Jeff has worked as a consultant to the Internet Archive, the Sunlight Foundation, OCLC, Cisco Systems, and the Economist Intelligence Unit.
http://www.ubois.com/

Inge Angevaare has been with the Koninklijke BibliotheekyNational Library of the Netherlands for elevent years. Lately, she combined a position as Policy Advisor to the Cataloguing and Processing Division with the responsibility for the Secretariat of UKB, the Dutch Consortium of University Libraries and the National Library. At present she is the coordinator of the Netherlands Digital Preservation Coalition.
http://www.ncdd.nl/en/index.php

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Director of Development at the State and University Library in Aarhus, Denmark
http://en.statsbiblioteket.dk/
Archiving cultural material – a holistic view
Cultural institutions in Denmark collaborate to identify methods and costs associated with digital preservation. One initiative follows the British LIFE2-project (life cycle management) to identify cost, another looks into new models for designing bitpreservation storage facilities, where the latter provides a very modular approach to balance cost and requirements, The talk will give an overview of these initiatives.

Hans Westerhof is program director Images for the Future at the Netherlands Institute voor Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid). Sound and Vision looks after, and releases, 70 per cent of the Dutch audio-visual heritage. In total Sound and Vision takes care of 700,000 hours of television, radio, music and film, making it a supreme collection full of national and international memorable events. In the project Images for the Future, Sound and Vision will digitise 280.000 hours of material.
http://www.imagesforthefuture.org/

Moderator:
Johan Oomen is managing the R&D department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, part of the Images for the Future project project team. He has been appointed in this position in 2008, but has been working at Sound and Vision since 2000. He is mainly working on externally funded R&D projects and managing the in-house deployment of Digital Asset Management technology. He holds a BA in Information Science and an MA in Media Studies. He is member of the Webstroom expert group funded by the SURF Foundation, on the use of streaming media in higher education and general secretary of the DIVERSE network. He has also worked for the British Universities Film and Video Council and the Holland Media Group.
http://instituut.beeldengeluid.nl/

Best of the Oxcars

20.30 – 23.00

From Spain, the “first international culture Awards in the digital age.” Conservas and EXGAE (a play on the Spanish collectors society SGAE, which it so much opposes) organise the OXCARS free culture event to reclaim our cultural works.

Times have changed. The Internet allows information and culture to be exchanged horizontally among all citizens, and now our means of cultural production have to adapt to this new democracy – not the other way around. Because free and collaborative culture is the Culture of our time, because it’s a fact, because there’s no turning back….

EXGAE & Conservas present: The awards that will sweep the Grammys, the Goyas, the Max…The 1st non-competitive awards in the history of Culture…The 1st international Culture awards in the digital society…