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Lessig on Digital Barbarism
Lawrence Lessig has posted a review of David Halperin's recent book, Digital Barbarism.
Halperin, who authored the (in)famous New York Times article calling for perpetual copyright, has now compiled his ideas into a book. Lessig offers a much-needed critique, including citing misconceptions about Creative Commons (Halperin conflates it not only with "freeware" with software... more
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Web 2.0 in Brazil: The Overmundo Case
Paula Martini · Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) · Dec 20th, 2007 1:34 pm · 40 votes · 2 comments
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Overmundo wins Prix Ars Electronica 2007 in Digital Communities category |
by siva001@YouTube |
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Many “web 2.0” websites are focused on technology. They use collaboration tools to talk about technology itself. Digg and Slashdot are two very visible and successful examples. However, how about using collaboration tools, but to talk about culture instead? That is the challenge proposed by the Overmundo project in Brazil: a site not for geeks, but for anyone interested in disseminating the local culture.
Overmundo was built to solve a very clear problem: coverage of Brazilian culture, especially by the traditional media, has been focusing primarily on the two major cities of the country, namely Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The majority of cultural scenes in the country are either ignored by traditional media or covered from the perspective of the two major cities, in many cases as something “exotic”. As a result, one of the most important characteristics of Brazil, its widespread cultural effervescence, ends up not being captured by anyone’s radar. This situation establishes an interesting “center/periphery” relation, in which two false worldviews collide. The one in the "center" (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo), responsible for judging and describing all the cultural activities taking place everywhere else, and the “rest”, which is in practice deemed as incapable of narrating its own cultural scenes.
Enter the Overmundo Project
To cope with this problem, Overmundo was built both as a community and a software tool. Today it consists of the largest community of people in Brazil aimed at promoting a big and neverending conversation about the Brazilian culture, in all its complexity and geographical diversity. Individuals and groups from all over the country write articles, post pictures, films, music, texts, describing their own places and communities, and creating national visibility for cultural events and scenes all over the country. Before it was created, these possibilities seemed almost unimaginable.
The idea was to empower artists, journalists, webloggers, cultural groups and anyone at large to provide their own views of the Brazilian culture, and also about cultural scenes in their own regions. At Overmundo, the community is king. It not only produces all the content, but it also decides what content to publish, and what content should gain more visibility. For achieving this goal, Overmundo was inspired by a broad range of "web 2.0" tools. These include from the Digg voting system, to Kuro5hin edit lines, Slashdot’s idea of “karma” and many other.
Overmundo managed to build a truly national and permanent conversation about Brazilian culture, involving all states and regions of the country. It has currently 29,000 active collaborators spread all over the country. The website is visited by approximately 30,000 unique visitors per day. The number of unique visitors has been growing at a consistent 20 percent rate every month, since the website was launched in March 2006.
Having being quoted as “a truly remarkable website dedicated to the arts and culture in Brazil” by Ethan Zucherman, one of the spearheads of the cyberspace democratization, in 2007 Overmundo also won the Golden Nica in Digital Communities category, at the Prix Ars Electronica, possibly one of the most important arts & culture prizes in the world (previous recipients of the prize include the Wikipedia, Creative Commons and Linus Torvalds). By the way, all content published at Overmundo is licensed under a Creative Commons license – the standard license adopted for all contributions to website is the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 licence.
From Overmundo to Overmedia
Overmundo has already been inspiring other initiatives inside and outside Brazil to follow the same model. Since the technological infrastructure for Overmundo was primarily built from scratch (and entirely licensed under the GNU-GPL License), its code is free to be shared, modified and used by other initiatives. Accordingly, any institution or individual can use the code to implement its own version of "Overmundo" (the software and its source code have been renamed “Overmedia”).
The first institution outside Brazil to use the code was iCommons. iCommons used parts of the Overmundo code to build a website open to decentralized contributions. A place for putting together and spreading projects dealing with free culture and access to knowledge all over the world.
Inside Brazil, several other institutions have been re-appropriating the model. A compelling example is the recently released National Public Safety Forum website. They use the collaborative model built by Overmundo, but not to talk about culture. Actually, the website is primarily used by police officers and other law enforcement authorities to talk about human rights and public safety policies, promoting a bottom-up exchange of ideas about important issues that include poverty, social exclusion, police violence and other difficult topics.
The system in a nutshell
Access to either iCommons and Overmundo websites is totally open. Anyone can read all the content at the website at any time. In order to participate with comments, to publish content or to “vote” for any content on the website, it is necessary to register. Registration only requires the name or pseudonym of the person or institution, and a valid e-mail address.
As mentioned above, the goal is to have 100 percent of the content being produced by the community and edited by the community. But then, how to achieve a quality control system?
The strategy for that was primarily inspired by the Kuro5hin, and by a range of other tools and projects. Accordingly, every item that is contributed goes first to the editing queue. For 48 hours, the item remains "quarantined" there, open to receive comments and suggestions from other users. During this period, any user can make suggestions and comments, and the author decides whether the item should be modified or not according to the suggestions received. Only the author can modify the item though, differently from the wiki model.
After the 48-hour period, the item goes to the voting queue. During this period, registered users can vote for the article publication if they liked it. The voting system is similar to Digg, but with relevant structural differences (the Overmundo website uses two different concepts: votes and “points”).
In order to be finally published at the website, the article must reach a voting threshold. Once this is achieved, the item gets posted (in case it's not posted, the article will still be searchable and available in the author's profile). From then on, the article can continue to be voted, moving to the top and eventually reaching the headline of the website. The points given by the votes are deducted over time, allowing new stories to get to the headlines if the community decides so by voting.
Overmundo template also uses a system of "karma", by which users can earn reputation points at the website. Votes given by users with higher "karmas" will have more weight than those given by users with smaller karmas, which means slightly higher editorial powers.
The Future
The success of Overmundo in Brazil is leading to the possibility of expansion. One project is to create new communities to discuss other themes that go beyond culture itself. This has been a growing demand on the part of the existing Overmundo community itself. Accordingly, in the near future, it is possible that Overmundo will become a constellation of websites, each one with its one community focused on a particular topic, and dealing with different issues, but always under a collaborative process. Stay tuned.
tags: rio-de-janeiro brazil media-events icommons overmundo local-context-global-commons brazil peripheries kuro5hin digg slashdot wiki wikipedia karma overmedia golden-nica ars-electronica free-software creative-commons
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