Archives for the Future

We’re at Communia and hearing about some very innovative memory institutions and archives. Yeah, yeah. The word archives puts everyone to sleep, but here are three projects that should perk you up.

Images for the Future

Images for the Future is a joint project funded by the Dutch government to digitize nearly 3 million photos, 140,000 hours of audio, and 150,000 hours of video & film. With a budget of €175m, there’s a lot of financial muscle behind this effort. But why such hefty funding?

So far, 1.5 petebyte of audio and visual data are being added a year. That’s 1, 500, 000 gigabytes. Yeah, nearly as much data as held in all US academic libraries!

The Images for the Future consortium won the bid by pushing for an economic, rather than cultural, argument for digitization. They crunched numbers on the return on investment to the government, tax payers, and even downstream entrepreneurs.

Despite all the ambition, Images for the Future is running into an archivist’s dilemma. Their mission is to optimize the availability of Dutch audiovisual heritage. But on the other hand, they’re obligated to payback the investment, plus navigate a myriad of external rights. That’s why they’re experimenting with new business models. They’ve created a YouTube channel, Flickr groups, partnership with Europeana, and are tinkering with new visualization tech like 3D cinema and desktop touch screens. A lot of their material is licensed under a Creative Commons license, yet they’re still sorting out how to sell footage and generate revenue from clicks, like portals paying out €1.85 per view.

It reminds me of a comment overheard today: digital preservation is easy to do, as long as you have money forever.

Open Images

Open Images is a spanking new project tackling the above problem while fostering participatory culture. Digital archives are exciting insofar as people are DOING stuff with the material, and not letting the expensive data bit-rot. So Open Images is encouraging the reuse and remix of their collection. They’re open as can be — deploying an open CMS called MMBase, open video codec (ogg theora), the HTML5 <video> tag, and open API (OAI-PMH, Atom feeds). All the content is cleared for creative reusel: CC BY-SA is preferred, and they’re interlinking with Wikimedia Commons to mutually enhance usability and scope.

However, Open Images doesn’t offered high-resolution content. Rather, only “internet quality” material is available, with the thought that high-res will later be exploited to generate revenue.

It’s an apt vehicle to explore new business models around open images and an experimental bunch behind it. Check out their slides to learn more.

European Film Gateway

European Film Gateway (EFG) is an EU-funded project to collect footage from film archives held in 14 countries. It kicked off in Sept. 2008 and will offer a full-fledged website in 2010. It builds off a previous archive, filmarchives-online.eu or MIDAS, with 270,000 works. But the biggest obstacle MIDAS encountered was how can users actually WATCH the films?

Enter the EFG.

It’s a free, central point of access for federated film collections across Europe. EFG is building interoperability of digital content and metadata, and it delivers content to Europeana, a growing library resource of European cultural works and metadata. The goal of the collection is to connect film archive material and link it to other bibliographic information. For example, irun a search for Film X, you’ll find out it was made by director Y. That takes you to biographic info about the director, maybe on Wikipedia.

There are copyright issues, of course. It’s hard for EFG to sort through multiple authors and rights holders. Often, the participating archives don’t own the rights nor are those rights properly documented. There’s a huge issue with orphaned works, not to mention the fact that the film medium has only been around since 1895, so copyright protection hasn’t expired on much of the content.

Conclusion: there’s a lot of innovating and large-scale projects to get Europe’s cultural heritage online. But hurdles undoubtedly mar the way. Fortunately, the Communia network is proposing some policy recommendations that will hopefully remove some roadblocks. The policies will be submitted in a few months time. In the meanwhile, check out the Communia website to learn more about the discussions and get involved.

Communia @ Barcelona

The 6th Communia workshop convened in the historic Universitat de Barcelona to sink its teeth into memory institutions and the public domain. Communia is a thematic network of over 50 members (universities, libraries, NGOs, and even companies), fueled by the generous public funding of the EU, to develop policy recommendations on the public domain and open licensing. The policy recommendations will be online in Sept. 2010, but currently they are being debated and digested internally within the network. It targets European legislation, soft law, and tools for the public domain in fields such as education, scientific research, libraries, businesses, and technology. It sounds ambitious, and it is.

Scoreboard of “openness” in universities

To break down these topics, we’re divided into six working groups. I joined WG 1 & 5, a joint endeavor to produce a “scoreboard” to evaluate universities against the various criteria set in the Wheeler declaration. The scoreboard arose from the Università Aperta online debate, organized by NEXA with Sopinspace during the Biennale Democrazia. A questionnaire will be completed in the next few days and circulated to universities. I’ll post the link once it’s available, so you can share it with colleagues or complete it for your own institution.

Public Domain Manifesto

You can find more proceedings and working group outputs on the Communia website. One project to keep an eye on is the Public Domain Manifesto, an effort to map and define the public domain, what it is, and should be, in theory and in practice.

Image: Communia Break by Wrote. CC BY-SA

atoms&bits: what’s happening this week?

(from antischokke)

Da wir inzwischen viel mehr Events im Rahmen des atoms&bits-Festivals ankündigen können, als wir zu wünschen gewagt hatten, ist die Kalenderansicht auf unserer Website etwas unübersichtlich geworden.

Stefie hat sich die Mühe gemacht, eine kleine Zusammenfassung der Events am Wochenende in unseren Locations rund um den Moritzplatz/das atoms&bits Camp in Berlin-Kreuzberg zusammen zu stellen, die ich hier gerne übernehme. Weiter unten findet ihr eine Auflistung der Locations.

Wie ihr seht haben wir am Wochenende viel vor:
Also kommt zahlreich & habt Spaß!

Donnerstag – 24.09

• 10.00-18.00: betahaus Cafè & Office 1 || Open Coworking Week
• 10.30-12.30: betahaus Cafè|| Coworking@Berlin – Medienboard-Event
• 20.30-22.30: betahaus Cafè|| Screening: “RIP – A Remix Manifesto”

Freitag – 25.09

• 10.00-18.00: betahaus Cafè & Office 1 || Open Coworking Week
• 19.00-21.30: betahaus Cafè || Direct Journalism Session
• 20.20-23.00: IMA Zentrale || Pecha Kucha atoms&bits special edition

Samstag – 26.09

• 10.00-11.00: IMA Zentrale || atoms&bits Camp Opening
• 10.00-18.00: IMA Basement || Camp Lounge (Tag I)
• 10.00-18.00: IMA Basement || Ruetli Wear Shirt Druck Station
• 10.00-18.00: IMA Basement || a&b Lounge Flee Market by OkiDoki Berlin
• 10.00-18.00: IMA Basement || A MAZE Playground
• 11.00-18.00: IMA Camp || atoms&bits Camp (Tag I)
• 11.00-18.00: Prinzessinnengarten || Breakout Festival – Outdoor Coworking
• 11.00-18.00: betahaus Café || please RT von Jens Wunderling
• 11.00-18.00: betahaus Café || Amy- “Street Art Game”-Präsentation von Michael Shuon
• 11.00-18.00: betahaus Dialog 1 || Die transmediale.09 video selection (Day 1)
• 11.00-18.00: betahaus Office 1 || CODE Plakatwettbewerb Präsentation
• 11.00-18.00: betahaus Bauraum || Washing Machine: Reloaded (Day 1)
• 11.00-18.00: betahaus Bauraum || re:bike Workshop (Day 1)
• 14.00-15.00: IMA Zentrale || a&b TALKS: Podiumsdiskussion (u.a. mit Johnny Häusler)
• 15.00-16.00: IMA Zentrale || a&b TALKS: Volker Bombien (O’Reilly Germany) – “Prototype Your Life” mit Arduino
• 15.30-18.00: betahaus Office 1 || DAAD Podiumsdiskussion – Digitale Politik
• 22.30-06.00: betahaus Cafè & Dialog 1 || atoms&bits Festival Party

Sonntag – 27.09

• 08.00-18.00: Überall in D || Wählen gehen!
• 10.00-16.00: IMA Camp || atoms&bits Camp (Tag II)
• 10.00-16.00: IMA Basement || Camp Lounge (Tag II)
• 10.00-16.00: IMA Basement || a&b Lounge Flee Market by OkiDoki Berlin
• 10.00-18.00: betahaus Bauraum || Washing Machine: Reloaded (Day 2)
• 10.00-18.00: betahaus Bauraum || re:bike Workshop (Day 2)
• 12.00-22.00: betahaus Café || Atoms&Bits Wahlsonntag – Live
• 12.00-22.00: betahaus Café || pleaseRT (Day II)
• 12.00-18.00: betahaus Office 1 || Ruetli Wear Shirt Druck Station
• 12.00-22.00: betahaus Office 1 || atoms&bits Wahlparty – Public Viewing
• 12.00-22.00: betahaus Office 1 || CODE Plakatwettbewerb Präsentation
• 12.00-18.00: betahaus Dialog 1 || Die transmediale.09 video selection (Day 2)
• 14.00-15.00: IMA Zentrale || a&b TALKS: Stephen Kovats (transmediale) – FUTURITY NOW! – Introducing transmediale.10

atoms&bits: a festival for thinking, making, doing

Are you a tinkerer? A designer, a geek, a maker, a co-worker, a free culture kid? Then there’s a festival that’ll knock your socks off. atoms&bits (a&b) kicks off this September 18-27th, and we’re looking for good people to join in and get creative. Read the festival pitch to learn more:

What is atoms&bits?

atoms&bits (a&b) are the smallest elements in our modern society. That’s what the atoms&bits Festival is all about: how we change society bit by bit, atom by atom – organized through the Internet and with real world results. a&b is a meet up for visionaries, tinkerers, activists, geeks, and artists – in short, everyone that celebrates a new culture of collective endeavor, and do-it-yourself. The five themes that everything revolves around are: (1) new forms of work (Coworking), (2) a fresh desire to tinker, (3) a new culture of openness (OpenEverything), (4) participatory politics, (5) the art of the production of art, as well as internet culture as the binding element that made all of this possible in the first place.

a&b Festival is a decentralized event that stretches over 10 days (September 18-27th). Individual events are taking place in different locations from Berlin to Brooklyn, from Munich to Montreal. The festival will reach beyond the physical boundaries of the event, allowing participation throughout the world. Globally more than a thousand participants are expected. In order to foster sustainable networks and collaboration, we’re creating connections to other events that complement the idea of the a&b Festival: all2gethernow (Topic: music; Location: Berlin), Breakout (Topic: coworking; Location: global); OpenEverything (Topic: open source principles; Location: global); Transmediale (Topic: art & digital culture; Location: Berlin).

a&b Camp is one of the central points of the a&b Festival. On the weekend of the German federal elections (September 26-27th) around 400 participants will meet at a&b Camp to discuss, plan projects, and to network. Borrowing from the Barcamp format, all participants will actively engage in the event; the presentations (“sessions”) are interactive and created by the participants themselves. In the open “Barcamp” area, participants will organize completely free sessions. Moreover, central themes of the a&b Festival will be addressed and discussed in several designated and curated rooms: Coworking, DIY, and OpenEverything. Spatial proximity and thematic ties will ensure intensive crossover among these topics.

The highlight of the worldwide festival and the kick-off for atoms&bits affiliated projects will be the atoms&bits weekend on September 25-27th. In Berlin the a&b Camp around Moritzplatz and several nearby events will take place then. The program includes exhibitions, live screenings, the a&b party, tinkering workshops, live coverage of the elections online, as well as an election party and more.

As you might’ve seen, OpenEverything is hosting a track at atoms&bits. We’ll be exploring how open principles bridge creative and technical fields, highlighting successful projects and talking hurdles and future plans. Leave a comment if you’d like to join.

Also, atoms&bits still looking for sponsors. The first bunch of sponsors is confirmed, but we need some more support. You won’t find a better audience than this. Please drop a line at sponsoring@atomsandbits.net, and we’ll send you the sponsoring options.

For more info, check out atomsandbits.net and read the great posts by Nicole Ebber, Peter Bihr, on Hallenprojekt, and a thematic warm-up in the Berliner Zeitung. There’s also pics on Flickr and of course some tweeting (@atomsandbits). And don’t forget: the Makers reading on Sept. 22 will also be part of the a&b festival.

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

Recycling Etiquette

Spotted on city trash cans throughout Berlin. The message: don’t throw your bottles in the bin. Instead, leave them outside on the ground.

Refunds for (beer) bottles supplement the livelihoods of many residents in the city. By leaving the bottles outside of the bins, people can make it easier for a second economy to thrive and, somewhat counter-intuitively, help keep the streets cleaner by supporting incomes of those less fortunate.

Interesting how public art (or public service announcements?) can endorse these norms and inform visitors of Berlin’s eccentric recycling policy.

Doctorow’s Makers Reading in Berlin

“For the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things.”

Join us on Sept. 22 for a public reading of Makers, the new serialized novel by hacktivist and BoingBoing author Cory Doctorow, as part of the Berlin festival Atoms & Bits.

What happens when hardware hackers get tangled up with microfinancing venture capitalists in the aftermath of the financial crisis? The answer: a fast-paced witty novel whose ending the public doesn’t even know. That’s because the book’s author, free culture advocate and geek writer extraordinaire Cory Doctorow, hasn’t published it all yet. The hardcover hits bookstores this October, but in the meantime, publisher Tor is releasing Makers tidbit by tantalizing tidbit.

We’re organizing a public reading of the book’s juicer excerpts. Performers are welcome, so if you’d like to entertain a friendly crowd with your rendition, please let a comment! Betahaus’ Christoph and DIY Masters student Pippa are already rehearsing (thank you!), and we’d love to have more of you take part. Update: Jay Cousins will join us as well. Cool!

The reading will fire up the Berliner festival on making and doing, Atoms & Bits. Since we’ll be spending the week glorifying DIY culture, openness, co-working, and the creative spirit, Doctorow’s novel will help set the tone and remind us of concepts like the Maker’s Bill of Rights: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.

Drop a line if you’d like to do some reading yourself, else see you on Sept. 22 at 20:00 at our tentative location in Neukölln’s own maker hub, Studio 70.

Also, if you’re interested in innovative publishing models, check out the Creative Commons case study on Doctorow and the author’s Forbes interview about “giving it away”.

Cover art: Sorry, I couldn’t find the attribution information for the cover art. If you know, please help a gal out. ^_^

Mickey Mouse as a Cultural Battlefield

Mickey Mouse is a legendary symbol in the copyfight. Of late, though, I’ve been noticing a surprising number of Mickey references — in street art, activism, and high-end fashion — that are making me revisit the controversial Disney mouse.

In winter 2008 H&M had a front line of Mickey Mouse clothing, no doubt mainstreaming a sub rosa fashion cue that had inspired the likes of Rihanna and Cate Blanchett. Elsewhere this year, sneak designer Jeremy Scott rolled out Mickey adidas kicks, while Hong Kong had an entire luxury Disney collection, and Louis Park presented a (super-Flashy) tribute to the mouse. Admist all that, fashionistas are posting endless snaps of themselves sporting Mickey gear.

Entering the scene with a twist of critique are the blank-face Mickey Mouse prints by Oh Logo. Their “Do Not Wear” collection is “ripping icons from the collective memory and reducing and diversifying them into a visual experience.”

The Oh Logo motto builds upon the older Mouse Liberation Front, an underground coalition launched in the seventies by cartoonists rallying against Disney’s “corporate seizure of the American narrative”. The MIL is rediscovering itself in the digital age and adapting the cause to the current copyfight. Screenings of RIP! The Remix Manifesto, for example, is one way people learn about Mickey, lawsuits, locked creativity, and the liberation efforts.

These developments interest me because they allude to an intersection of high-end / mainstream fashion with a political movement. Perhaps Mickey Mouse parallels what’s happening already with pirates — those daring outlaws who are stealing the limelight both in fashion and politics.

Come to think of it, pirates are pretty well-backed by Disney, too.

What do you make of the Mickey Comeback?

Suggested reading: Cory Doctorow’s debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Bob Levin’s Disney’s War on Counterculture.

Images: Classic serigraph by Oh Logo, Official member of the Mouse Liberation Front bysukisuki / CC NC SA

Open Up! Creative Commons Case Studies for Design

Open Up! Creative Commons Case Studies in Design on Slideshare

Last month, John and I gave a presentation about Open Design at the DMY Symposium in Berlin. It was a bright and welcoming audience of young designers from the International Design Festival DMY. We were graciously invited by the event’s organizers (thank you, Ake!) to talk about how open concepts and Creative Commons licensing can help designers realize their ideas, reduce barriers to collaboration, and altogether foster creativity.

So you want to Design?

We started off by outlining a few problems that designers might typically face. My friend Linda, a designer herself, helped tease out some of these issues. Firstly, young designers may not know where to find material they can build upon, let alone where and how to publish thier work so that it too can be discovered.

Secondly, young creators lack what their successful counterparts do not: fame. So while established artists have more clout and social capital, an aspiring designer has to fight bitter battles to just get their work seen let alone purchased. Nowadays, perhaps more so than ever, audience attention is drastically limited and overburdened by digital noise. That’s why Tim O’Reilly’s observation continues to ring true: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” So designers, instead of worrying about someone “ripping off” ideas, you should be more concerned about winning eyeballs and getting people to talk about your work.

Lastly, what other problems might a budding designer face? Basically, anything that’s going to cost them a lot of unnecessary money. Like lawyers and extraneous licensing fees.

A Ray of Hope

These are at least some problems that open licenses such as Creative Commons’ can help solve. For example, all CC licenses require attribution, so each time someone distributes or reuses your work, your name is mentioned. And for anyone who understands how the net works, getting mentioned (i.e. getting linked to) is a good thing. Plus, with CC licenses you can embed metadata, which enables your work to be maschine-readable and indexed by search engines and other tools, which makes it much easier for people to find your stuff.

By granting additional permissions to your work, you’re inviting people to participate in the creative process with you, which can improve your designs and encourage people to become fans and active supporters of your ideas and projects. It’s also important to reiterate that with a CC license, you never give up your copyright. You still retain certain rights, and it’s within the frame of copyright that CC licenses acutally function. What’s more, when you use CC’s free licensing tools, you don’t have to go through the hassle of hiring a lawyer and negotiating a contract for every use. Instead, the licenses are standardized and publicly available, which means anyone can use them to publish a work for which they control the appropriate rights.

Ok, now that there are some arguments for why one should open up their work, but what about some good examples of how?

Open Design in Practice

One elegant story of open design comes right out of Berlin. Ronen Kadushin, a long-experienced designer and adventuring spirit, is pioneering the practice of releasing “source code” for high-end furniture under a Creative Commons license. Students, amaetuers, and competitors alike can download Ronen’s AutoCAD files and build and customize the pieces themselves.

Ronen’s beautiful and playful designs, as well as innovative approach, have won him much attention and fans. People often send him design remixes and purchase completed pieces from his online retailers or gallery exhibitions. Ronen says he enjoys the adventure of going open source and seems quite pleased with the results so far.

Open fashion is another field of innovative design in Berlin. Cecilia Palmer, founder of the open source fashion label Pamoyo, recently unveiled The Red Shop in Kreuzberg, where she sells finished pieces made from organic materials. You can also download her patterns and make the clothing yourself. As with Ronen’s designs, people are encouraged to unleash their creativity on Pamoyo’s collection and drop Cecilia a line when they’re done.

Arduino is of course another cool example of how openness can inspire  creators and reinvigorate design. This low-cost electronics platform runs on simple yet powerful hardware and software, and it’s been the darling of design and circuit communities since it hit the market. Users can buy completed boards or build their own from Arduino’s freely available CC-licensed files. The applications for Arduino are nearly limitless: robotics, game design, visuals, interactive sculpture, energy monitors, you name it. But one of the most fun ways to learn about this open tool is to hack it in collaborative geek-glee at an Arduino workshop. As for the economics and social trends around the platform, Clive Thompson’s analysis in WIRED is certianly worth a read.

A final key component in many open design circles is community. Thingiverse, for example, is a lively online community for digital fabrication: 3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, and the whole lot. They share their projects online under open licenses so that people can play, comment, build upon and improve the designs. The same is true for cadyou, Flexible Stream, and Open Draw Community.

Looking for more?

A number of these example and more are documented in the Creative Commons Case Studies project. We’re always looking to expand this resource, so if you’d like to share your experience in Open Design, please consider adding your story!

Images: Open Up! Creative Commons Case Studies in Open Design by Michelle Thorne / CC BY, Bird Table by Ronen Kadushin / CC BY NC SA, Pamoyo / CC BY NC SA, Replicating Rapid-Prototype by Ethan Heim / CC BY NC SA

Illegal Street Knitting

Walking around Kreuzberg a few months ago, I spotted my first “illegal street knitting”. Masquerade, the playful rouge knitters behind the guerrilla action, document their stitched streets bombs on their site and share their thoughts about the craftism movement. You might also catch their work on commuter trains. Apparently, the Masquerade crew likes to embroider messages like “kram” (Swedish for “hug”) into the fabric of the seats.

Check out the tourist map to see if there’s any unruly sewing your neighborhood. Better yet, grab some needles and spread your own yarn!

Art + Arduino = Artuino

If you haven’t yet played with Arduino, the low-cost open source hardware that’s captured the imagination of geeks and artboys alike, then you should really try one out (Berlin retailers: Tinkersoup and Fritzing). The chip is incredibly versatile and easy to use, and you can customize it will a million different components and do tons of cool hacks.  If you’re a n00b like me, then just getting the LED light to blick is satisfaction enough.

On June 20 – 21, Anton (Tinkersoup) and Arnon (Artuino) organized an Arduino workshop at IMA Design Village in Berlin. Over 100 musicians, designers, and hardware hackers came to play with wires and circuit boards. Each group was given some design goals, and from an assemblage of old electronics and nimble Arduinos, we built mini games and toys. Our group ended up gluing together an inverted pinball game made out of CPU cooling fans and a retro switch controller. The goal of the game was to blow a balloon into a wire hoop, which triggered a digital camera to take a goofy picture of you.

There were a lot more sophisticated projects at the workshop, including two musicians exploring how to tear away from hunched over, laptop-bound harddisc jockeying. Instead, they wanted to build instruments that allow musicians to move around and perform, while having all the electronic techniques available like looping and filters. Onyx Ashanti (video) wowed the crowd with his “beat jazz”, a blend of dance music looped live from a MIDI clarinet. The instrument is hooked to a mixter and laptop steered by a Playstation controller and iPhone — incredibly complex but wonderful to listen to. Marco showed us his “Ast / Tree Branch”, a handmade free-standing instrument that the musician controls by sliding his fingers along the branch’s neck. Very cool sound and a real chance for artists to compose electronic music while having analog interaction.

Hopefully there will be more opportunities for all these creative folks to get together again. I know I certainly had a lot of fun and learned a lot. Thanks so much to the organizers and to the participants!