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.

If you don’t get excited about the iSummit after watching this, then I want to know. And if you’re excited enough to want an iSummit in South Africa next year, join the African Commons Project mailing list here.

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:

1. The copyright is in the public domain because it has expired;
2. The copyright was injected into the public domain for other reasons, such as failure to adhere to required formalities or conditions;
3. The institution owns the copyright but is not interested in exercising control; or
4. 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!’

Pic from flickr, CC BY NC SA

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?

When I’m big, trienjte, I will buy your print.

Copyright: trienjte