Icommons.org

Location-based digital storytelling overlays a physical landscape with a digital one in a way that enhances the experience of the physical with additional sights, sounds and stories. Think of a Google Map of your home town with your grandmother’s stories pinned to it here and there: to the open field where once a flea market bustled on Saturday mornings, or the old movie theatre where she once romanced.

This exciting and engaging form of merging physical and digital worlds is by no means new, but is becoming increasingly popular thanks to technological advances ‘ making locative media devices, such as mobile phones and GPS-devices, cheaper and more pervasive ‘ and the emergence of a range of new Web 2.0 services. In this article we will explore a few interesting location-based digital storytelling projects, and then look at tools that you can use to create your own mapped stories. (more…)

Check out this video, courtesy of Missinglink, of the successful Bring n Braai ccSalon that was held in Cape Town featuring guest speakers, Creative Commons CEO, Prof Lawrence Lessig and Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales.

Music by the winners of the ccMixter SafroBrazil Remix Competition Whispa (SA) and Lucio K (Brazil).

Today we launch a 7-day campaign to find 21 sponsors to each donate $3,000 and name a base camp on the way to the Summit. To achieve this crazy task, we need your help. Please download one of the buttons at the bottom of this page and post to your blog or site.

Then tell your friends to tell their friends to tell their friends and lets see how quickly we can reach the Summit using the power of iCommons communities around the world.

The first company to donate $3,000 is the South African company, Old Mutual. Thank you so much - you are our official Base Camp 1, first ‘visionary patron’ in what we hope will be an awesome success story.

This month we take a closer look at the host of communities using Mediawiki software to collaboratively document information and collect media, on a variety of different subjects, ranging from song lyrics to textbooks. The emphasis of this article is not necessarily on the amount of contributors or entries or the ‘openness’ of the content, but rather on communities who have collected useful reference material and resources, people who have used wiki software in an innovative way, and communities who have been motivated to contribute on niche topics and popular cultures. There’s the wiki weird and the wiki wonderful, something for everyone ‘ so keep reading!

Wikitravel
When I visit Wikitravel, the useful information snippet on the front page reads: ‘In Singapore, chewing gum is available only in pharmacies - (more…)

We hear of the thousands of people from around the world who contribute to Wikipedia on a regular basis ‘ the number is so huge that it is easy to think of ‘them’ as a mass of faceless knowledge bearers who so meticulously edit on topics such as ‘enzyme kinetics’ and ‘convex regular polytopes.’

Well, this month we singled out one of ‘them’ ‘ Ian Gilfillan, a Cape Town local who, amongst many other things, developed the first South African online grocery store, runs an organic product delivery business called ‘Ethical Co-op’, and practices transcendental meditation. Not only is he a keen contributor to Wikipedia, he also has a very clever translation tool up his sleeve, which he has used with great success for the development of Afrikaans Wikipedia. (more…)

‘All rights reserved’ not the only option for documentary filmmakers Documentary filmmakers take note: there are alternative ways for you to distribute your films - rather than the ‘all rights reserved’ approach of the copyright world, take a look at the ‘creative’ side, the Creative Commons way.

Creative Commons provides licences that take a “some rights reserved” policy towards the use of knowledge and creative works, and thus may better serve the needs of documentary filmmaker who have a tough time gaining audiences and revenues. (more…)

This month, iCommons’ resident copyright columnist, Tobias Schonwetter, explains what troubles him about the fair use doctrine and why the doctrine is less user-friendly than commonly assumed.

At a recent conference in the Caribbean, I was given the opportunity to express some of my views on copyright-related matters. Naturally, a lively discussion took place and subsequently a number of people approached me to share their ideas and opinions with me. It was during one of these talks that an Asian delegate told me that his country was about to replace the present set of specific copyright limitations and exceptions with a so-called fair use provision. (more…)

The following is the second post in a two part interview with conceptual art collective MTAA. I discuss specific works and what the collective has planned for the iCommons Summit. We concluded part one of the interview talking about how MTAA define the workings of a ‘collaboration’, and the discussion continues below. (Read part one of two in this series here.)

T.Whid: So we’re making this new graphic illustration or diagram and my first inclination was that I don’t really need to collaborate with the people running the Summit. It’s like, I’m giving them this thing, and they can do with it what they will. But at the same time, I want it used there, so I guess I have to be proactive in asking for certain things.

AFC: Right, but just to be clear on collaboration at the Summit, when you get there you’re doing some sort of collaborative project are you not? (more…)

Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence. In the weeks leading up to the conference, interviews will be posted once weekly, profiling the artists’ work and describing their approach to Creative Commons licensing. Artists to be interviewed include Ana Husman, Jaka Železnikar, Joy Garnett, Kathryn Smith, Nathaniel Stern and this weeks interviewees, Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden (who go by the names M.River and T.Whid), of MTAA. Tim will be representing MTAA as one of the Artists in Residence at the iSummit in Dubrovnik.

MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) is simply described on their website as ‘a Brooklyn, New York-based conceptual and net art collaboration founded in 1996.’ I like them (more…)

In our global history where education has been distributed unequally in the past, even knowledge as basic as physics and Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion, has not been accessed by millions of students around the world. Today, however, things are very different. Quite literally, any of the three billion people who now have mobile phones could receive Newton’s Laws of Motion on these potential learning devices.

A new hot fad service called Twitter could now enable Newton’s Laws to be sent to an unlimited number of mobile phones, at no cost for the service. The laws could be sent by SMS - the limit of characters in a single Twitter message is 140. In the image of Newton’s Laws of Motion shown here, the laws have 138 characters.

When mobile phones are suggested as tools for learning, it is a common reaction to think that it is too soon to get started. But why? The need for teaching and learning is enormous and there is a young generation who need to get educated - now. (more…)