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 and
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 OxCars
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 13
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/
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 and editor of Quarterly French Review MULTITUDES
Dymitri Kleiner, author of Telecommunist Manifesto
http://www.telekommunisten.net/
Nate Tkacz, Melbourne University
http://nathanieltkacz.net/
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
Sandra Fauconnier, Curator, Nederlands Instituut voor MediaKunst
http://www.nimk.nl/
Michael Murtaugh, writer, web designer, and creator of the Active Archives
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.
Thijs van Exel, Head of Communications, Kennisland. He is responsible for communications & positioning of Images for the Future and project manager for innovation showcases called ‘Pearls,’ where the focus is open content.http://www.kennisland.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, Duke Law School, author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
http://james-boyle.com/
Bas Savenije, Director General of the Dutch Royal Library, Koninklijke Bibliotheek
http://www.kb.nl/
Lucie Guibault, assistant professor for copyright and intellectual property law, Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, Europeana, and Communia
http://www.ivir.nl/staff/guibault.html
Simona Levi, Free Culture Forum Barcelona
http://fcforum.net/
Charlotte Hess, Syracuse University
http://library.syr.edu/about/people/staffbio/Hess_Charlotte.php
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, Project Manager of OAPEN and Publisher of Digital Products, University of Amsterdam Press
http://www.oapen.org/xtf/home?brand=oapen, http://www.aup.nl/
Harry Verwayen, Europeana Business Development Director
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
Jaromil, free software programmer, media artist and activist
http://jaromil.dyne.org/
Marco Sachy, Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics
Dolf Veenvliet, Blender 3D educator, & W3C certified web developer
http://www.macouno.com/
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, General Coordinator Open Video Alliance. Co-founded the SFC @ Berkeley chapter of Students for Free Culture, co-organized the Free Culture 2008 Conference and the Open Video Conference in New York City.
http://openvideoalliance.org/
Michael Dale, Open Media for Wikipedia
http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dale/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Media_Projects_Overview
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, counselor on personal archiving for Fujitsu Labs of America in Sunnyvale, California, and to video archiving for Intelligent Television and Thirteen/WNET in New York.
http://www.ubois.com/
Inge Angevaare, Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation
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/
Dinner
18.00
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…
AUTHOR |
Economies of the Commons 2 published the article. (date not supplied) |
SOURCE |
| http://ecommons.tuxic.nl/?page_id=1590 (retrieved on 22/10/2010) |
