Ozzie Commons

The Building an Australian Commons conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is hosted by Creative Commons Australia with the support of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and the State Library of Queensland. I will be performing at the ccSalon with the Terminal Quartet and present on a roundtable discussion exploring the possibilities for music under Creative Commons in Australia.

Video Slam

(Illustration by Mushon)

Video Slam is a unique event in that it not only provides a forum for the open content philosophy, it’s host to a hybrid form of production where people from across many arts disciplines can meet, network and make something… together! It’s certainly the earliest of production initiatives solely devoted to Creative Commons licenses in Australia that I’m aware of…

Are we insane?

Lecture notes prepared for Creative Commons Clinic, School of Law, Queensland University of Technology, 30 March 2007.

ccSalon reprise

it was quite a night… i’m not sure what happened, cause it was all pretty much hit and miss given the fluidity of the agenda… i mean, it was lovely, but not everyone turned up for the 9am-ish start and i didn’t realise the OAK Report was being launched that evening, just prior to our event and that it was all integrated… but that meant we had some exception legal minds in tow and opportunities to broaden exposure to the kind of work some of us engage with.

overall, a fine start to what may well transpire as the first of many more such events nation-wide. clearly, a lot of consciousness raising will be required to alert creatives to a broader understanding of flexible licenses… if anything, it may just keep their audiences and listeners out of jail come january 1, 2007!

i really enjoyed the works that were contributed through the flickr community, such as these few that were published after the event:

Photo: yinyang

Photo: yinyang

Photo: Felix42

Photo: RaeA

ccSalon, Brisbane, 2006.

GRIT

Screen shot from Grit, a video work produced by ccSalon.

cc Salon Brisbane, 2006

http://creativecommons.org.au/ccSalon

Me, myself and i… the Summit

A report on my participation at the iSummit 06, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Read the full report here, or download PDF (includes extensive footnotes and photos).

Punk Commons

The iSummit has attracted former filmmakers, television producers, lawyers, IT specialists, remix artists and amongst the many more vocations declared here, we even had a “I was once a punk rocker” in our midst. They showed us photos of themselves in dreadlocks just to prove it. A few hours later they declared, “as a punk rocker…”!

Road to Rio

In 1992 I wrote an article exploring the hopes and aspirations of a movement seeking to encourage the world’s leadership to urgently address the environmental degradation that ails us still. I was in Rio for the Earth Summit.

There was no doubt a wave of hope that swept through all participants there, but despite the means being so apparent, we find ourselves in 2006 where this is talk of a resumption of commercial whaling and governments the world over are considering Nuclear as a “viable and clean” energy option. If, as Lawrence Lessig puts it, creativity is built on the past, clearly common sense is not.

If we’re unable to address the big issues, how can we expect to deal with the details, that which contributes to the sum of many parts that constitute the power bases that sustain poverty, wealth and everything in between?

iSummit 06

After 14 years since I participated in the Earth Summit, I’m returning to Rio de Janerio… this time as a guest of Creative Commons (CC) and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), with whom I worked with there in 1992. Although back then I paid for half my airfare and Pegasus Networks covered the rest.

Specifically, I’ve been invited to iSummit 06, to participate in the panel, Music, video and multimedia: the cultural commons. This will involve a brief presentation on the recent forum, Free Screen Culture and an overview of my CC projects which include Synesthesia Urbania and Secession Records. More significantly, it will focus on the online video resource tools for OPEN CHANNEL (OC) and our members being created in collaboration with EngageMedia.