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I just received a copy of David Bollier’s new book which goes out for sale today. I had the pleasure of meeting David on a few occasions where he asked all the right questions about the commons movement around the world. In the future, we’ll talk to our kids about this time, so it’s great to see the book as ‘the first comprehensive history of the attempt by a global brigade of techies, lawyers, artists, musicians, scientists, business people, innovators, and geeks of all stripes to create a digital republic committed to freedom, transparency, participation and innovation.’
You can buy a copy on Amazon or New Press. The inside cover of the book says that you can download a free, CC-licensed copy from onthecommons.org or viralspiral.cc but I can’t find the download link. Have asked David but if anyone finds it, please let me know 
I’m really serious about these ones.
1. Eat more icecream
2. Take a day off every week
3. Be silly
I’ll be reviewing my progress in quarterly installments.
Thank you, Juhie Batia from Global Voices, for the inspiration.
1. Most days: Waking up with my beautiful boys.
2. Feb: Sapporo with K and laughing ’til my stomach ached.
3. March: Fun with Tash in Jozi - fun like in the old days fun.
4. April: Driving 15 hours to to spend 24 hours soaking up the Northern Province bush.
5. August: The close of what may be the last iSummit in Sapporo, Japan. Pic: iSummit 08 group pic by Fred Benenson on Flickr CC BY
6. August: Going to the onsen with my friend Rebecca and washing it all away.
7. November: Celebrating my god-daughter’s second birthday with my second family in Jozi.
'We can' Barack Obama's acceptance speech by jmtimages on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA
8. November: Woohoooooooooooo! Listening to Obama live on CNN during his nomination acceptance speech on my couch at home in Jozi.
9. November: Being very insignificant in my very special brother’s annual celebration.
10. December: Making Christmas mince pies for my friends Oso and Brij in Oakland and learning how hard it is to know the right path when you come across it in the dark.
I arrived home last night after three weeks in the US of A.
I’m happy that I got to finish my application to the Berkeley iSchool. A week before I left, I realised that I had to write the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and send in my results by the application deadline of 7 January. I had all but given up (and was feeling pretty happy about not having to write the test) when I found a test center where I could take it on the day that I left. Studying all week (the GRE is one third math - *not* my forte) I was pretty damned nervous when I drove my friend Oso’s car to the center in Fremont at 6am on Saturday morning. Half way through the test, the computer wouldn’t move onto the next section. We were then told that there was a world-wide problem with the GRE and that we should all go home and come back on Monday. Unfortunately, on Monday, I would be many feet in the air somewhere above Senegal (again, math is *not* my forte), and so I sat waiting for the problem to be sorted.
Hanging out at the test center for the next three hours, I met another Heather and her two friends who were working there as a part-time job while they finished college. They were talking about the worries of finding a job in the current economic climate, and wondering how they were going to pay off their student loans. I also saw a bunch of kids - no more than 8 years old - filing into the computer room to do tests for a gifted child program. All the kids were Asian-Americans. They were all accompanied by parents who looked a lot more nervous than they did. I felt sad that they were in there having to undergo all that stress when I suddenly realised that they probably didn’t see it as stressful in the least. As my trusty Kaplan guide to the GRE said: If you see this as a stressful, excrutiating experience, then it’s going to be a stressful, excrutiating experience. The GRE is a game - see it as that and you’re well on your way to having a great time with the thing (my words, not those of the much more lucid Kaplan Guide).
I don’t know whether I managed to take the GRE with the same level of calm as playing Scrabble with Oso on Christmas Day (there’s something about seeing your component in the flesh that makes beating them to a pulp so much more tangible and certain) but at least the scores that I got straight afterward confirmed what I already knew: math is *not* my forte. ‘Verbal reasoning’ on the other hand - now *that’s* my forte. In the end, I know I could’ve done better in the math at least (my score was the same as when I started studying!) but after all, the GRE is a game. And like losing at Scrabble sometimes, it doesn’t mean you’re not a good wordnik. Only that you lost the game.
CC has just celebrated its 6th birthday in San Francisco. I’m sad I couldn’t make it. Jetlag had me asleep at 6pm. But this photo of Lessig at the party makes up for it.
Pic: Happy 6th Birthday Creative Commons! by felicity redwell CC BY NC SA
I’ve had an idea brewing to write a blog next year about facing up to fears. The idea would be to do something that I’m afraid of every day for 100 days and write a daily post about the experience. Being in America brings it gushing to the fore. I realise how much I’m afraid of: looking into someone’s eyes after I’ve smiled at them as I walk down the street, telling someone who I love and admire just how I feel, saying no to a person when it’s clear where the power lies, walking into the city without a map and asking strangers for directions…
Small things, but I realise how big they become when you don’t give yourself the chance to face them.
What I’m interested in is being able to recognise when our fear is protecting us from being hurt (driving on the wrong side of the road, for example) and when it’s just stopping us from doing something because it’s uncomfortable and new (driving on the wrong side of the road, for example).
I’m only reticent because it’s so personal and would expose the my points of weakness (another fear in itself) - but, after reading another of El Oso’s beautiful posts (beautiful because it reflects such a revealing honesty about the author and his response to the world), I’m inspired to give it a go.
I can’t believe I missed this. A year ago, Zoopy announced Creative Commons integration enabling users to retain copyright and choose their own licenses and sharing conditions. Very cool. (Belated) congrats, Jason and the team One suggestion, though: doesn’t look like there’s any explanation of CC in the drop-down menus or the terms. Probably a good idea to hyperlink the licenses to the code on cc.org like they do on Flickr.
It’s always so great when you can see how the little you can give can make a huge difference. This from the fabulous folks at AfriGadget, a new project called ‘The Grassroots Reporting Project‘ that aims to find, equip and train more AfriGadget reporters in the field throughout Africa.
As this is our pilot project, we want to start small and learn lessons before we expand to other parts of the continent. Our first group is made up of some youth from the Khayelitsha township outside of Cape Town. Local blogger Frerieke van Bree is acting as their blogging and multimedia mentor as they are taught how to find and tell stories about local inventors, innovators and local people doing ingenious things around Cape Town. Two of the individuals that will be taking part in the program are Lukhona Lufuta and Zintle Sithole. Both live in Khayelitsha Township near Cape Town.
So glad that David Sasaki had stirred the pot a bit with his recent post about the South African blogging community not being nearly diverse enough.
I know that it’s frustrating when you feel that you’re only trying to help, but I’ll put this out there: how much are we as a blogging community really trying to do to heal the divides and build a bit of diversity into the South African blogging community? Diversity, as we’ve learned all too well in South Africa, is not just the right thing to do to build a stronger nation, it’s the right thing to do because it improves the quality and uniqueness of the industry. And in a world where quality and uniqueness are so important to stand out from the global crowd, this is the *most* important thing that we as a blogger community can do to uplift a frankly tired and staid local industry into something that we can be proud of.
Again the question: what have we done?
Have we actively sought to invite a diverse range of people to blogging events like the 27 dinner?
Have we done anything to bring new bloggers into the field with any training or mentorship?
Have we sought out the opinions of bloggers from people outside our own circle?
Have we commented on and supported the posts of new bloggers?
I say this because I accept some of the blame myself. This is a community. A community where we take collective responsibility for moving the industry forward because it’s important for all of us. Bloggers tend to be huge individualists, and I think that’s why we’ve focused on being better bloggers, getting better contacts, extending our own individual networks. But I think the time is ripe now to give some time and energy to the collective.
Let’s try to be less defensive and more reflective. You might think that David was being overly harsh. But the really average thing to do here would be to keep things as they (averagely) are.
Let’s make some communal new year’s resolutions to try. Because, frankly, I don’t think we’re trying hard enough… in fact, we’re not trying at all.
goes to the incredible people like my beautiful mom who volunteer for Hospice to care for the people who we’ve abandoned. Health-e news has a great article on the Dream Centre Hospice in Pinetown.
Very excited to have gotten iHeritage up today. Really looking forward to the seminars and photo walks that we’ll be doing in the new year. If anyone is interested in helping out, please email me or join the Jozi mailing list.
Jason Bronkhorst in 'Babylon', first issue of Pangram
I love the first issue of Pangram called ‘Babylon‘ and I love the reader/publisher tool they’re using called ‘Issuu‘ (great page-turning action and pretty design) and I love this great pic of Jason called ‘what-a-yummy-icky-eye-you-have-there-in-your-hands’ (actually that isn’t the official title).
I like what Jason says below about getting stuff done:
There are many other gems in there (like Charl Malherbe’s illos - and if you don’t know what illos are you are as dumb as I was about 2 weeks ago), so please take a look.
Jason and Charl (a.k.a. Infiltrate Media) are our favorite designers and have done some really beautiful work for us at iCommons and more recently, the rad illustrations on africancommons.org and, very impressively, these beautiful illustrations for a job I’m doing for Cyber Nurse.
The new Cyber Nurse flyer
What I don’t understand is why people don’t use illustrators more. In Japan, even the roadworks signs are illustrated with cute little men in uniforms, and everyone knows that being able to see cute little men in uniforms as you navigate your way through the busy streets makes ALL the difference!
I wish beautiful people like Jason and Charl and the cool folks at Pangram many, many riches (both material and immaterial). May the true ‘doers’ like them lead long and happy lives.
Pic: 'Untitled' by 'Unidentified photographer' but (still) copyrighted 'Smithsonian Institute'
I’m doing some research on what museums and cultural heritage institutions are doing to put their collections online and make them more accessible. A wonderful resource is Flickr Commons (wish we’d had it for our Heritage Day project!) with the goals of 1) increas(ing) access to publicly-held photography collections, and 2) providing a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.
Participating institutions have to make a public statement that there are “no known copyright restrictions” - in cases such as:
- The copyright is in the public domain because it has expired;
- The copyright was injected into the public domain for other reasons, such as failure to adhere to required formalities or conditions;
- The institution owns the copyright but is not interested in exercising control; or
- The institution has legal rights sufficient to authorize others to use the work without restrictions.
But the Smithsonian Institute’s Rights Statement is confusing. Instead of there being ‘unrestricted access’ and ‘no interest in controlling usage’, their statement indicates that they do, in fact, wish to exercise control, that there are, in fact, certain restrictions, and that your rights are limited to those that you already have according to fair use law in the United States (that’s according to the statement, but the FAQ adds to the confusion). Below are some exerpts from the notice:
‘Text and image files, audio and video clips, and other content on this website is the property of the Smithsonian Institution’
‘Fair use is permitted’ (so kind). They do specify what (they believe) constitutes fair use, but leave out online publication (putting it in the FAQ at the end of the page instead).
And then, most interesting:
‘Anyone wishing to use any of these files or images for commercial use, publication, or any purpose other than fair use as defined by law, must request and receive prior written permission from the Smithsonian Institution. Permission for such use is granted on a case-by-case basis at the sole discretion of Smithsonian’s Office of Product Development and Licensing. A usage fee may be assessed depending on the type and nature of the proposed use.’
So if you’re a community organisation wanting to build your own collections to spread access even further, this particular ‘commons’ is out of reach.
Don’t get me wrong - I think this is still a great initiative. But it really makes me realise how important it is to expose institutions who claim all the glory, when they are not quite there yet. For me, a real digital commons is one that fully enables downstream re-use and re-publishing. For the Smithsonian images, at least, Flickr Commons enables us to look but to definitely not to touch.
‘We are helping make the Internet a place…
where you and your neighbors build the world you want.
that generates not only economic value, but also civic and social value.
that is optimized for multiple languages and locales.
that is trustworthy and has minimal risk for users.’ (Mozilla Foundation site)
Two weeks ago, Mark Surman from the Mozilla Foundation wrote to friends asking how they would explain the ‘open web’ if they had ‘a few inches on CNN or BBC’. Two days ago, he summarised the responses, saying that mostly he ‘got blank stares, which may mean I asked the question the wrong way. Or that it’s too abstract. Or just that people are busy.’
I felt the same way when I asked participants of the last iSummit to build ‘checklists on openness’ that would explain for people outside the movement exactly what constituted an ‘open web’ in their field/community and what practical steps they could take to practice openness in their own work.
Initially, people thought it was a great idea. But when we got down to business, I, too, got a lot of blank stares - thinking, too, that I’d framed the task in the wrong way, or that it was just a bad idea.
But reading Mark’s question, I can’t help but thinking that this is *not* ‘too abstract’ and that the blank stares have a lot to do with the fact that we do too much talking about licenses and products but not enough explaining and talking about what the philosophy means to ordinary people. We have some great organisations like Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation and Wikipedia that individually represent a lot about what the open web is about, but the branding of these orgs has meant that we often equate them as the epitome of openness, when, in fact, openness is much more complex, and reliant on an entire ecosystem of organisations, communities and individuals.
I think that the fact that we aren’t coming closer to working out what the ‘open web’ means is a result of this complexity and this complexity is based more on the need for many communities to work together to build these understandings rather than the fact that it is too difficult to quantify.
Right now, the open web is about the ‘cool factor’ which, although an important part of any movement building, leads us to focus on very small parts of the open web (i.e. licenses, copyright) rather than making us focus on the whole (i.e. transparency, community, collaboration).
I love the phrase in the Mozilla Foundation’s opening lines: ‘where you and your neighbors build the world you want.’ because I think that the most critical thing about the open web is that the concept/definition/explanation should be localised according to different contexts. In the same way that Wikipedia has different communities (language communities in this case) deciding (and changing their decisions about) what World War II is about, an explanation of the open web should accommodate different local, dynamic understandings of the concept.
This doesn’t mean that we will never get to a point where we can give an explanation about the open web on CNN or the BBC. It only means that we need to move to this question in a way that says upfront that, although we can have a global brand for the open web, that these explanations will always be local and dynamic, and should always invite people to question the current conceptualisation of the open web, rather than to just accept it.
Having said all that, if I had an inch on CNN or BBC to talk about the ‘open web’, this is what I would say (based on the mapping that I’ve started here):
‘Think of a place where you and your neighbors decide what the rules are and that the only rule is that there has to be a really good reason to keep people out;
Where you’re greeted with a big welcome mat that says ‘Please come in and play’ rather than ‘Keep out until you’re invited’;
Where you can prove yourself by doing and making things and showing them to the world, rather than waiting in a line to be chosen;
Where you can talk and build with people around the world who see your difference as an asset rather than a liability;
Where the default is to share, rather than to keep hold to yourself;
And where what you read, hear and see is always an invitation to participate and create, rather than a one-way broadcast.
Around the world, people are building a new place on the web that engenders the principles of transparency, openness, sharing, collaboration and participation. The open web is a conversation about how the world can be better, and how ordinary citizens can help build it as an example for others to follow.’
Last Christmas, I read Barack Obama’s memoirs: Dreams of my father - an autobiographical narrative about his life growing up in the U.S., trying to make sense of his identity as the child of a black Kenyan father and white mother from Wichita, Kansas.
Reading about his experiences as a community organiser in Chicago helped me to question my own contributions, and gave me a deeper sense of what it means to be a global citizen.
This morning, I watched his speech with a lump in my throat. He seemed to be speaking to me when he said, ‘To all those watching beyond our shores: Our stories are singular but our destiny is shared.’ I don’t think we realise just what the implications are of this victory - not just for America, but for the world.
I listened to Talk Radio 702 this morning and heard John Robbie asking whether we were all being too hopeful about the change that can come from this one man. But when I look at the Obama website and recognise how much his campaign was about getting people to really understand how they needed to stand up and take action as a community with a common purpose in order to make the change they want to see in the world really happen, I know that even after the victory celebrations are over, America will be a more active, more engaged, more hopeful place. And that is what will make the difference.
His acceptance speech echoed this. He talked about the tremendous work that still needs to be done and how ‘a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice’ is the only thing that will make the long road ahead victorious. I really, really hope that there continues after this election to be a focus on community collaboration and action. I, for one, will be making my own contribution where I can. And perhaps I will say to my children: ‘you know, when Obama won the election, I wasn’t even allowed to vote!’
I wanted to look up the article that was written in Brainstorm this morning. I have the mag somewhere but wanted to read the online version. This is what ITWeb expects online readers to pay to read articles online. I still don’t understand the logic and can’t believe there are still magazines who block stories like this (especially for past editions that I wouldn’t be able to buy off the shelf even if I wanted to!)
Reading a bit more about what the magazine industry is saying about digital editions led me to a great quote entitled ‘The Deadly Sins of Digital Publishing‘ from the MPASA website that states plainly that there are great opportunities for digital editions in terms of providing easy access, adding value online and delivering greater value to advertisers, but that the greatest sin is a ‘failure to commit’.
‘If you can’t commit to it, you should spend your energies elsewhere.’
I couldn’t agree more.
Woices is a beautiful little site ‘that allows people to create, share and consume echoes, audio records which are linked to a very specific geographical location or real world object. Woices ultimate goal is to extend reality by creating a new layer of audio information, what we call the echoesphere, that will make the world a more interesting place.’
Bekka and I are going to record a few Jozi walks through our favorite neighborhoods, aren’t we Bekka?
As I develop a draft concept document on a new iSummit in South Africa next year, I’m looking around at cool events to draw inspiration from, and perhaps form partnerships with. The International Development Design Summit is one such event which will be hosted next year in Ghana (as part of the Maker Faire Africa concept being spoken about on Ned).
This is a great event because it seems to be:
1. Interdisciplinary - ‘we believe that innovation thrives in the intersections of disciplines that come from bringing together such an eclectic group’
2. Focuses on doing rather than talking - ‘we emphasize the development of prototypes, not papers and proceedings’
3. Demonstrates co-creation in action - ‘It is our goal to demonstrate a model where a user-based community of active, creative designers can invent, innovate and inspire each other to create new technologies’
It’s great that the group has hit on the key issue that the open source/open content revolution inspired:
In the traditional model of development, communities receive donated technology, and while they may be trained in how to maintain and repair the technology, they are rarely taught or encouraged to evolve the technology and adapt it to their needs.
And it’s for this reason why it’s a little sad that they’ve fallen into another ‘traditional model of development’ trap: that innovation for ‘development’ is only about electric generators and HIV/AIDS projects, and not also about projects to get musicians to market their music, artist collectives to build innovative public art projects or interactive games that are about communities doing nothing more than finding a way to have fun together.
It looks like there is some will for Maker Faire Africa to involve artists in ‘fabrication conversations… as well as (to) create relaxed times and spaces for networking’ - but I know that this really has to be central to the concept - otherwise artists end up being the background music, decorating the space, rather than key participants to innovation challenges.
I’m thinking that for the iSummit next year we really need to make the connection between artists/creators and technologists/builders a central focus. I’ve had visions of things like an open day where artists come with their challenges (marketing their work online, building fun projects using technology, creating public art using public domain footage) and work on prototypes for projects with interdisciplinary teams who are then funded to bring the concepts to market.
Or building the entire event around a week-long prototype-building affair, where we fund, say, 10 ‘Innovation challenges’ and their development over a period of time. There would be a closed workshop for the 50 or so participants to come together, learn about prototyping and creative techniques, intellectual property management etc and then build their own prototype solutions to the Innovation challenges. In the weekend after the workshop, there’d be a festival, open to the public, in which participants could conduct ‘reverse-engineering’ workshops where they could show how they designed their particular solution - as well as some simple workshops around learning specific skills.
We could get big names to sponsor relevant ‘Innovation challenge’ prizes and involve universities, technikons and schools around the world.
Ok, now I’m getting really excited, but will have to chew on this a while. And would love to know what you all think!
Now this is clever. Jamie Oliver, in an effort to ‘get the country cooking again’, has launched a campaign called ‘Jamie’s Ministry of Food‘. The idea is to get people to start up small cooking schools all over the country by starting a ‘pass it on’ chain to teach Oliver’s simple recipes to friends. The name was inspired by a campaign during World War II in which the British government appointed the Ministry of Food to help families make the most of wartime rations by setting up a national network of ‘Food Advice’, educating the public about proper nutrition so they’d be healthy and fighting fit.
It’s great to see how intellectual property sharing methods are being used here. Oliver enables people to download high res logos (affiliating themselves to the campaign) to advertise their classes and has also given away recipes from his new book for free on his MySpace channel.
But the Terms and conditions on the campaign website are confusing. Everything on the site is restricted under copyright and trademark law, say the standard terms, ‘unless expressly stated otherwise’.
Intellectual Property Rights Including Copyright
- The names, images and logos identifying Jamie Oliver, Channel 4, all of our associated companies or third parties and any products and services are proprietary marks of these parties. Nothing in the Terms shall be construed as conferring to you any licence or right under any intellectual property right of all the above parties unless expressly stated otherwise.
‘Otherwise’ appears on this page where you can download ’some cool logo’s to help you publicise your own Pass It On event’ but there is no detail on how far you are able to go here: use the logos on your website? use the logos offline only? use the logos if you are a commercial company in the food industry? offer the download from other sites?
The lack of detail is probably unimportant for most - but it is this lack of clarity that comes about the law is so completely out of synch with newly-accepted practice such as the non-commercial sharing of trademarks and copyright online.
What it also shows is how companies are having to experiment with practice methods of controlling their intellectual property without the aid of the law. A beautiful example of this is on the registration page of the site where Oliver asks that people ‘promise’ (without any reference to this in the legal Terms and conditions) that they only register to receive information if they are willing ‘to learn a recipe then Pass It On to at least two people’.
I’m looking forward to seeing the results!
Just got this in an email. Sounds very exciting indeed! The Johannesburg theme is: ‘Neighborhood and co-existence’.
‘Join Ars Electronica, voestalpine and Linz09 on an expedition around the world and into our future.
From June 18 to September 6, 2009
In 1872, author Jules Verne dispatched Phileas Fogg, a gentleman who liked nothing more than an interesting wager, on a trip “Around the World in 80 Days.” In 2009, Ars Electronica, voestalpine and Linz09 will be sending the City of Linz on such a journey. This won’t entail any physical travel though.
The mode of conveyance will be the fiber optic cables and satellite hookups of our globalized Information Society. “80+1″ will be visiting 20 locations across the face of this planet at which our future is being invented and mastered or thwarted and destroyed. Each of these places is linked to a particular theme: migration, climate change, energy, resources…
Join us on this journey into the future! Send us your idea for a project: LIVE BITS - art exploring real time connectedness.
The deadline: October 31, 2008.
The aim: facilitating fruitful interaction among people at widely separated locations and analyzing it while it’s happening. All the details, topics and background info are online at www.80plus1.org.’
I’ve been thinking for a while now how great it would be to have a Maker-Faire-type event in South Africa when Jess Hemerly from the Institute for the Study of the Future sent me a link to an AfriGadget post by Erik Hersman on the idea (original post by Emeka Okafor is here). I always wanted the iSummit to be more about really making stuff: making, building, working together on concrete, real things that you can touch, test and experiment with (Maker-Faire’s strapline encapsulates my favorite things in the world: build, craft, hack, play). I think it’s one of the best ways to learn and one of the most important ways to show how innovation can work in the digital space after the event (where there isn’t the awesome opportunity for people to get together physically).
According to AfriGadget, the organising team of the Ghana event ‘will collaborate with the organizers of the International Development Design Summit (IDDS), which will be held at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in mid/late Summer 2009′. There are so many potential partners for an SA event, but I’m particularly interested in the intersection of music and the arts (thinking of Dean Henning’s awesome musical toys ‘basic circuit bending’ experiments at LiquidFridge in 2007).
More soon…
Pic by Nortis on Flickr CC BY NC SA
To kick off my research into what’s happening in the Internet space in SA, I went to see one of my favorite people yesterday and came back super-inspired. Mike Stopforth runs a company called Cerebra who specialise in creating social media and mobile campaigns for companies like Samsung Mobile SA and the really interesting IS-Labs project. The great thing about Mike is that he really understands what old-fashioned companies rarely realise: that being open (and that’s open in the most essential human way rather than using open licenses) is probably one of the most valuable things that you can do for yourself and your company. Mike’s always been willing to make a connection, set up a meeting, speak at an event or just give good, solid advice - without any concrete idea as to whether he’ll get something out of it. And with me starting again again, I’m really grateful for that.
Anyway, enough of the mushy stuff. What got me really excited talking to Mike was his enthusiasm for us doing more innovative tech events like the iSummit. He noted that there is such an opportunity to put on great events in the spirit of Pop!Tech, TED and Foocamp in SA - but very few people who could really pull it off. The experience that the SA team has had in running these great events with an international network of some of the world’s top Internet thinkers is a great foundation for doing something as amazing - if not better - here, and I’m starting to think that it’s something I really want to do.
So. Watch this space.
Interesting article in the Mail & Guardian by Stephen Gray about the similarities between Mda’s Heart of Redness and Jeff Peires’s The Dead Will Arise. Mda had thought that the reference to Peires in the dedication of Heart of Redness would be enough, but American historian, Andrew Offenburger, traced so much of the text to Peires that he felt that this wasn’t sufficient (read sections of copied, paraphrased and sequential borrowing here).
Heart of Redness was ‘Seemingly… in reply to the challenge made by John Edgar Wideman, the African-American novelist, who had remarked that if South Africans could not produce fiction on their own writer’s gift of a theme — what used to be called “the national suicide of the Xhosas” — they were a lot of moegoes.’
Offenburger says: ‘What saddens me most about The Heart of Redness is that we readers of South African literature have lost an opportunity to read a substantial account–for the first time–of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing from the perspective of a Xhosa novelist. Instead, we are given another author’s paraphrased words and vision. And without clearly attributing how much of the novel originated in Peires’s text, most of us likely assume the material to be Mda’s.’
I find it interesting that Peires will not pursue the matter. ‘He admires Mda’s location scouting and concurs with Mda that fiction-writers are traditionally irresponsible anyway, taking advantage of being shot of the disciplinary controls of academic discourse. So Peires will leave it at that.’
Michael Moore has released his film, ‘Slacker Uprising‘ for free download to residents of North America. If you try to download from the website, you get a message saying ‘the lawyers tell us we are only allowed to offer the film to people residing in the United States or Canada’. If you go to Moore’s blog, you’ll read that ‘If you live outside the U.S. and Canada, I’m sorry that I don’t own the rights to make this film available to you for free. But it will be coming to a theater, video store or television network near you soon.’
My ‘recovering lawyer’ friend, Andrew, says that this is probably due to the fact that Moore has used copyrighted and trademarked media in the film that he has rights to publish under fair use in the U.S. (or fair dealing in Canada). He might also have bought rights to music used in the film only for the U.S. and Canada.
The “problem”, as they surely would have realised when they decided to release the film online, is that if this is an attempt to prevent “copyright infringement”, then it’s a poor one. Since Moore has ‘embraced BitTorrent, and the official download is using the Pirate Bay tracker’ (I can only read what others have said about the download since I, too, am a resident of the Wild Wild South), anyone who has downloaded the film can make the torrent available to others (the torrent protocol has no methods for limiting by geographical location).
What irks me is that Moore, whose films are supposedly “anti-propaganda”, hasn’t acknowledged the irony of his film’s lack of availability to fans outside of north America. If he doesn’t get a distribution deal outside of north America, will the film ever be available to people outside of that region? And if it doesn’t (reviews of the film are not favorable) then I’ll add that one to the list of how the Internet is actually reducing access to information rather than increasing it globally.
Thanks for the link, Nathaniel!
Gerhard Marx is suing Ireland Davenport and BMW for copyright infringement in the South African High Court on 9 October. Last night, prominent South African artists raised about $55,000 by auctioning off their works in a campaign called ‘david & GOLIATH‘. Owen Dean is representing Marx and has been quoted as saying that ‘his client has developed a reputation that might be held “in lesser esteem if it is known that is has been used for commercial purposes.”‘
commercial-archive probably has the best account of the story - including links to an entire archive of artists who use maps in their work. The similarities in the concept of the BMW ad, though, are remarkable and I’m going to be very interested in how BMW tries to argue this one out of court.
I’m always interested in what Google does for CSI (corporate social investment). In this case, they’re going to be choosing no more than five projects that ‘help as many people as possible, in any way’ and finding funding to launch them.
The winners will say a lot about how the company (and the people who vote for the ideas online) frame problems in different socio-economic contexts, and how they think these problems can be solved. Interestingly, the focus is on the idea rather than the people (you can submit an idea and suggest an org to carry it out, but Google will decide who should implement the project). I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing - ideas people are not always good at implementing - I only wonder whether they should also have had a more participatory process to decide on the who the implementers will be. Implementation partners should be measured by their experience and reputation - and what better way to measure that than to open this up to the wider community to help decide.
I also wonder why Google didn’t find a better way to enable people outside of the Google context (not necessarily offline users in the developing world, but at least those who spend less time online at telecentres etc due to high costs than their Northern counterparts) to help decide the winning ideas. If you’re going to get a community to decide, then you need to ensure that you have a representative sample to help decide it. Otherwise it will, once again, be someone else’s solution to someone else’s problem.
Kup Kup Brooches., originally uploaded by Kup, Kup Land.
I’m spending my Heritage Day doing what I love best: checking out the online craft scene and making things. What a beautiful way to start the day with this inspiration from Kup Kup!
A couple of us have been working on trying to ‘map’ the ‘move towards openness’. This is my attempt - covering the different levels of openness in communication input - process - output. I’m sad not to be at the openeverything event in Cape Town that Mark and Philipp are organising - looks like it’s going to rock!
The iSummit is done and dusted. Beautiful event. Starting to look like a festival. Now for some rest.
Pic: by Kenji
A friend who lives in New York sent me this awesome article by William MacNamara on the regeneration of Jozi inner city in the Financial Times. It made me realise how important it is to have outsiders saying such great, positive, optimistic things about living here. South Africans certainly aren’t going to say it!
David Bollier has a great article on onthecommons.org that talks about the differences between the ‘commons’ and ‘market’ sectors and their inter-relationship.
‘The commons sanctions idiosyncratic experimentation and creativity that is often too risky and costly for most markets to undertake. This is one of the key ways in which communities of social trust out-perform the market and corporate bureaucracies. The commons doesn’t have the expensive overhead or imperative to be marketable. The commons can afford to be flexible and customizable, especially to local needs. It has great appeal because it tends to be more culturally authentic than broadcast networks and Hollywood studios that cater to large, lowest-common-denominator audiences.’
I just blogged about the Global Voices Summit and the importance of community for bloggers on Techleader. What an awesome event.
Pic: by nehavish on Flickr, CC BY-NC
This awesome video produced by David Sasaki introduces the Rising Voices project of Global Voices which ‘aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities.’
I just wrote this as my letter in the iCommons Lab Report (to subscribe go here):
Dear friends,
Last week, the iCommons team had a short workshop session to practice the ‘Checklist on openness’ that we’re hoping to work with participants to develop at this year’s iSummit. We practiced by using an equally slippery concept that we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is the question: ‘What makes an organisation ‘international’?’
After an initial brainstorm to capture the key characteristics that we should be looking at (including things like staff, community, beneficiaries, mission and funding) we started looking more deeply at what boxes needed to be checked in order for an organisation to validly call itself ‘global’.
What we came up with probably posed a lot more questions than answers. For example, ‘Do you need an internationally representative staff to be an international organisation – or is it enough for the staff to be aware of diversity?’ And ‘Can any small non-profit organisation claim to have beneficiaries all around the world – and does it matter if most beneficiaries are in developed countries?’ And perhaps most importantly, ‘What does it mean if most of your funding comes from one part of the world, and goes to another part of the world?’
We did, however, come up with a few answers – all of which were incredibly illuminating.
If a global organisation is only as global as the respect that it has around the world, then we need to develop mechanisms to ensure that we are accountable to our beneficiaries, as well as to our funders. Peer assessment, in other words, should be built into everything that we do. This also means that we cannot claim to have too diverse a range of beneficiaries because we will not be able to serve them all, and we will therefore suffer from their negative assessment as a result.
The exercise also showed me how important the distribution of funds is in the development of a validly international organisation. If we accept that an international organisation must serve a wide variety of local beneficiaries, then the organisation should necessarily have more than one physical location. This means that the organisation should spend its money in more than one physical location, thus empowering the network to serve its beneficiaries more effectively.
This doesn’t mean that money is the only way to empower local communities, but it’s absolutely essential that the wide distribution of funds is part of the question of how global, really, is a particular organisation.
I did this very basic graph of where iCommons spends its money, and I feel that, although we’re doing pretty well, we can do more to distribute funds outside of HQ.
This is not an easy thing to say because it seems so hard sometimes just to keep the core economically sustainable. But I do think that it’s a conversation worth having – a conversation about the shifting identity of a global organisation in a shifting world.
What do you think?
Best wishes,
Heather.
I know that there are probably a lot of requests for help going around, but I received a message from IkamvaYouth based in Khayelitsha that , as a result of the xenophobic violence, they have between 400 and 900 people in their hall and they don’t have enough food to feed them. Says Susan Godlonton, ‘There are 20 infants, 3 pregnant women (one in severe pain), and people are beginning to get sick. They are all sleeping on the concrete floor, and we are struggling to ensure that everyone gets fed. Although TAC and other organisations are doing an INCREDIBLE job at coordinating civil society’s response to the crisis, and ensuring that donations reach those in need across the country, more help is needed.’
You can email me if you’d like to help or ‘To find out what’s most needed at the time of your donation, please contact Bongani on 0726483278, or IkamvaYouth on 021-3626799. Their bank details are:
Bank: Standard Bank
Branch: Cape Town
Name of the account: Ikamva Lisezandleni Zethu
Account Number: 070188009
Swift Code: SBZAZAJJ’
Pic: Volunteers from the TAC’s helpnow website
There was no cake, no champagne - not even a speech. And it’s only now that I’ve been able to take a breath, that I can say this about my decision to hand over the public leadership of Creative Commons South Africa to Dave Duarte.
In 2004, I came back to South Africa after an incredible 9 months at Stanford working with Creative Commons as part of my Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship programme, supported by Benetech. Benetech had funded my fellowship because I had originally pitched to the digital society entrepreneurship programme a project to use GIS systems to predict conflict in the African Great Lakes region. But a few months into the project, having been volunteering for Creative Commons, I realised that my passion was with this young organisation. Benetech supported my decision, even though it would have no direct contribution to their work in conflict management. For that, I cannot be more grateful.
After coming home in 2004, so many people need to be thanked for their help in growing this fledgling cause. I remember feeling like a bible salesman when I first started making appointments to go and see people I thought might be able to support, since at that stage, Creative Commons was only a year old and very unknown: a crazy idea by some funny-looking white American man that I believed South Africans should take ownership of.
My parents funded Creative Commons for the first few months. After that, the incredible Anriette Esterhuysen from the Association for Progressive Communications agreed to allow me to host an awareness-raising programme funded by Osisa with the APC, and then two amazing women, Luci Abrahams and Alison Gillwald agreed for the LINK Center at Wits University to host a two-year programme funded by the IDRC called ‘Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons’ which supported Creative Commons in South Africa as part of its mandate. Two years ago, I started with iCommons - a new international organisation, incubated by Creative Commons, with HQ firmly on African soil. Since then, the team at iCommons has done an incredible job flying the CC flag with the fabulous CC Salons and consultation work that we’ve done to help organisations, communities, companies and individuals to understand the application of Creative Commons.
There are so many more people to thank - everyone who volunteered and supported Creative Commons when it was unknown but offered just the kind of vision they were looking for, everyone who listened to my continuous sales pitch about why CC was so great, and my dear friends who came to listen to me speak about Creative Commons when they made up 70% of the audience.
I decided to hand over my public leadership mainly because iCommons is now separate from Creative Commons in the sense that Creative Commons is no longer the sole member of iCommons - still a member but now one of four. At this very critical stage of iCommons’ independence, it is important for us to forge a new identity, separate from Creative Commons but still tied to the broad, common vision that we both share.
Handing over to Dave was an incredibly easy task. Dave is already a passionate volunteer. He has done some incredible things already in his teaching and community work to raise awareness of Creative Commons and its potential for innovation and sharing. Most of all, Dave fundamentally ‘gets it’ and he’s also a bit crazy in his own way which makes him exactly the right person to carry on the Creative Commons South Africa story.
I’m certain that we’ll still be working together in the many, many areas of mutual concern, and I can’t wait to see the great things that will happen to CCSA in the next few months.
Good luck, dear Dave. May the force be with you.
Last weekend, at Lou and Mike’s wedding at Gwahumbe in KZN, I reconnected with old friends, the Takis brothers from Swaziland who I last saw about eight years ago on one of my very best holidays to Kariba and Sodwana. My cousin, Tash and I were planning on going to Mbabane but the Takis’s were going to be at their game farm bordering the Kruger Park just outside of Phalaborwa, so we packed up our khaki and headed off on what became a 7.5 hour drive to the farm on Friday night.
You will know how incredible it was when I say that driving 15 hours for a weekend was totally worth it. We arrived at about 3am to the sound of lions mating just outside the house. We saw giraffe, elephant, kudu, klipspringer and a very inspired dung beetle. But the best sighting from the weekend was what we later called a ‘bushy-tailed-mongoose-shaped-sheep’ but which I’m sure was actually a spotted hyena. We were almost at the farm with Tash driving when she slowed down as a shadow crossed the road. The animal was locked in the headlights as we stared each other down and he then ran off.
Life in Africa sure is good.
More pics on Flickr here.
‘Sunset’ by H Ford CC BY-SA and ‘Spotted hyena’ by Eva Hejda CC BY-SA on Wikipedia.
7pm, Elton Place: Anna B, me, Lara and Steph
10pm: Melrose Arch, The Venue (which venue? the venue)
midnight:
4am: The Bohemian
10am the next day:
I’ve never felt so special. Thank you to all my dear friends for making it a night to remember! Especially to my brother Quinton, my new friend, AnnaB and to my dearest friend in the whole world, Kerryn.
Pics: by Anna Berthold on flickr CC BY-NC-SA
Where else can you get the most beautiful, geeky stuff to hang on your office wall but at the iCommons Auction. We’re raising money. Help us
Picture: Free Culture Doll by Hannah Upritchard
Oh, so this is why I had a sore neck when I woke up on Saturday morning.
Picture: Julie Melton on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
One of my favorite board members, Jimmy Wales, will be in Johannesburg in exactly 11 sleeps. Jimmy is in the country to launch the African Wikipedia Academies - a series of Wikipedia sprints, workshops and boot camps to encourage the local celebration of Wikipedia as an amazing tool for education, culture and enterprise in Africa.
As I continually say, Wikipedia is not exciting because its the biggest encyclopedia in the world. Its exciting because it gives us the opportunity to write our own history, our own textbooks, our own view of the world. Wikipedia is a practical expression of what makes the Internet special. And practicing contributions to Wikipedia is what makes us realise what the Internet is really for. It’s not just about using, its about being active participants in the creation of meaning about the world around us. It’s about valuing a resource that is powerful because it is in the commons - free for anyone to reuse, remake and remix.
Jimmy is coming to South Africa because he is passionate about his goal of ‘Wikipedias in every major language in the world’ - and this is where he’s starting the experiments. I’ll never forget how kind he was in drumming it into me that the Wikipedia way is not to just translate English articles into Afrikaans articles (even though it might start out that way). The idea is that a local language community can build its own Wikipedia completely separate from the English version. It is this autonomy and the community spirit that has enabled Wikipedia to thrive on the back of volunteer contributions by over 50,000 active users.
A number of schools in South Africa use Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia copyright license enables anyone to freely copy and share the resource in textbooks, lesson plans etc as long as it is attributed. In terms of local language Wikipedias, Afrikaans Wikipedia has an active community of contributors. But contributors are hardly applauded for their work in the local press, and a lot needs to be done to encourage the smaller local language editions of Wikipedia.
This is the goal of the African Wikipedia Academies. iCommons is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation to bring people like Ndesanjo Macha, considered the Father of Swahili Wikipedia, Ian Gilfillan, a great contributor to the South African local language Wikipedias, as well as Frank Schulenburg who conceptualised the first Wikipedia Academies in Germany.
Better yet, we’re having a fabulous cocktail party during which Jimmy will talk about Wikipedia, Wikia (the business application of wiki software) and a vision for the Academies. Everyone is invited to that one. All you have to do is shell out R500 in aid of the Academies, and join the party at 4pm on Tuesday the 13th of November at the Grace Hotel in Rosebank. Register here. Everyone who is anyone on the SA Internet scene will be there. I promise.
Opt out register a hit
December 4, 2008 in blogging, ilaw | Tags: donn edwards, defamation, fair comment | by novelheather | 2 comments
I’m doing some research on defamation cases against bloggers in light of the blogger Donn Edwards being sued by Quality Vacation Club for complaining about the lack of transparency in the company’s direct marketing efforts, and have found a great resource in the Direct Marketing Association of South Africa’s ‘opt out’ register. According to the DMA, the service enables consumers ‘to have their details removed from mailing lists used by marketers to promote goods and services’.
I’ve complained consistently to companies who call or SMS me about where they get my details, so I really hope that this works. It’s really simple to do, just go to this link on the DMA’s website and add your details.
I know that the Electronic Commerce and Transactions Act enables people to send communications to individuals but that there must be an opportunity to opt-out of further communication. We really need to put pressure on companies to implement opt-out instructions on SMSs and emails because it seems that so many are not. I also found this great email to send to companies who send unsolicited mail on internet.org.za: