[Commons-research] Draft report from Free Culture 2008
Giorgos Cheliotis
gcheliotis.lists at gmail.com
Wed Sep 17 12:17:27 EDT 2008
Dear all,
here is a report I wrote for the research workshop. Please take a look
at it and let me know quickly in case you find that I have
misrepresented anyone. I wrote this in a hurry and based on my own
recollection of events. As long as you don't find anything seriously
wrong with it, iCommons will post it online. If anyone is kind enough
to do some proofreading as well, I'd appreciate it.
Best,
Giorgos
Report from Free Culture 2008, a.k.a. the Research Lab of iSummit 2008
by Giorgos Cheliotis, based on personal recollection and the notes of
Prodromos Tsiavos
Every year the iSummit attracts several academics from different
disciplinary backgrounds with a common interest in the promotion and
study of free cultural or 'commons-based' practices. This year we
organized the First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free
Culture, or Free Culture 2008 for short, as one of the iSummit 'Labs',
to provide an opportunity for academics, researchers and practitioners
to present their findings and learn form each other.
By any measure Free Culture 2008 was a success. The workshop was well
attended (15-40 participants per session) considering how many
presentations, discussions and meetings were taking place in parallel
during the summit. But it is not about the numbers. Many of the
presenters expressed their gratitude for the organization of the
workshop and their appreciation for the quantity and quality of the
constructive feedback they received during the summit. In keeping with
the spirit of the summit, sessions were attended by a wonderful mix of
researchers, practitioners and 'amateur scholars' who engaged in
discussion and constructive criticism on a very open and egalitarian
basis.
But the workshop did not start at the summit, it started much earlier,
before everyone could fly to Sapporo. The workshop's highly
interdisciplinary academic committee reviewed extended abstracts
submitted by researchers from around the world and the chairs selected
about half of the submissions for presentation at the iSummit, based
on the results of the peer review process. Over 90 reviews were
written in a very short timeframe and this was already a first success
for the workshop and a first big step towards guaranteeing that the
presentations would meet certain criteria of quality and
methodological rigor, as expected by the research community. We are
greatly indebted to the academic program committee for their
stewardship of the workshop.
Given the more academic nature of the research workshop as opposed to
other iSummit labs, it was organized mostly around formal
presentations of ongoing research, with the addition of a free-for-all
speed-geeking session and a concluding open discussion session. The
sessions were as follows:
Session 1: Perspectives on Free Culture
Herkko Hietanen (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology)
started off the presentations of the workshop with " Honey I Took Out
The Trash: Curbside Recycling Motivations and the Free Culture
Movement", an exploration of the relationships between the
environmental and the free culture movements. Christopher Adams, an
independent scholar from Taiwan, presented a more theoretical
perspective on free culture and its relation to the native American
tradition of potlatch with "Sovereignty of Free Culture: Georges
Bataille and the Accursed Share". Leah Belsky (Yale Law School)
presented her work with Yochai Benkler and Byron Kahr on the study of
well-known communities and indie music labels employing different
forms of commons-based production methods, titled "Everything in its
Right Place: Social Cooperation and the Production and Distribution of
Creative Works". Finally, Jeong Min Choi (Seoul National University)
presented her work with Jisuk Woo and Seo Woo Choi on the clampdown of
the entertainment industry on Korean file-sharing users and the
effects that lawsuits have had on users' subsequent behavior, "How the
Korean Entertainment Industry’s Move to Directly Sue Individual
Internet Users Influences the Users’ Attitudes and Activities".
Session 2: Applications and Challenges of Free Cultural Practices
Prodromos Tsiavos (London School of Economics and Public Policy)
started the next session with his presentation titled "The Museum as a
Cathedral and a Bazaar: Tracing Flows of Rights in the UK Cultural,
Memory and Education Sector", a work in progress on the utilization of
commons-based approaches by UK cultural institutions and individual
artists. Eric Johnson (University of North Dakota Law School) took
over to present "Copysquare and Konomark: New Ways to Be Friendly With
Your Intellectual Property", two proposals on new ways for authors to
indicate their pro-sharing attitude and license content for use in
various media formats. Finally, Wolf Richter (Oxford Internet
Institute) presented his work with Irene Cassarino on the application
of an open licensing model for the production of a collaborative film,
in "Lessons Learnt From Implementing an Open Licensing Model in
Distributed Film Production – The case of "A Swarm of Angels"".
Session 3: Online Communities and Social Networks
Philipp Schmidt (UNU/MERIT and the University of Western Cape) kicked
off the third session with a presentation of the methodology he is
using for a survey of Wikipedia users, whose results should be out
soon, in "Wikipedia - First Results From the Official Survey and Some
Thoughts on Motivation, Distribution, and Quality". Then Alek
Tarkowski (University of Warsaw) presented an analysis of data he has
collected on Flickr users and the licenses they use, in "Social and
Cultural Practices with Free Cultural Works. Case Study of the Flickr
Web Service". Chih-Kang Cheng (Yuan Ze University) took over the
podium to present a case study of the most popular online community in
Taiwan, which is a BBS, in "The Study of Sharing Behavior in BBS
platform in Taiwan – a Case Study of Virtual Communities in PTT".
Giorgos Cheliotis (National University of Singapore) closed the
session with his presentation of preliminary results on a study of
collaborative remixing in the ccMixter online community, titled "Remix
Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Creative Reuse and the
Licensing of Digital Media in Online Communities".
Session 4: Speed-Geeking and Poster Session
This was a free-for-all session with some invited posters and the
opportunity for anyone to walk in and present their ideas relating to
the themes of the workshop. In a less formal setting than in other
sessions, Prodromos Tsiavos (London School of Economics and Public
Policy) presented some results of his work on the self-organization of
the Creative Commons volunteer community and with a special focus on
the patterns that emerge from online interactions on mailing lists.
Koichiro Hayashi (Institute of Information Security) presented a
proposal for a platform for the registration, tracking and enforcement
of CC licenses on any type of digital content. And Kim Tucker (Meraka
Institute) talked to us about his proposal for a new license that will
solve some of the incompatibilities between the CC BY-SA and the GFDL
licenses.
Session 5A: Quantifying the Digital Commons
Juan Carlos De Martin (NEXA) in "Geospatial Context Extraction for
Creative Commons Licensed Digital Contents" provided an overview of
the methodology utilized by researchers of the NEXA center at the
Technical University of Torino, including Elias Carotti and Davide
Bardoni, to crawl the Web for CC-licensed content and extract
geospatial information about the location of the author utilizing
information retrieval methods. Then Ben Bildstein (Queensland
University of Technology) presented his study of CC license use in
Australia and the lessons derived from this study on how to best
collect data on CC use, in "New Methodologies for Quantifying Licence-
Based Commons on the Web".
Session 5B: Perspectives on Freedom and the Commons in East Asia
First HyoJung Sun (Seoul National University) presented her work with
Jisuk Woo and HyunSoo Na on the role of user-created content in Korean
politics with "Influence of the UCC Regulation during the Political
Campaign in Korea on Free Culture". Then, instead of Han-Teng Liao's
(Oxford Internet Institute) scheduled presentation which was
unfortunately cancelled due to the presenter's inability to travel to
the workshop venue, Cynthia Jimes (ISKME) presented an overview of
research activities at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge
Management in Education in " "Travel Well" Open Educational Resources:
A Presentation of Ongoing Research", joint work with Lisa Petrides and
Anastasia Karaglani.
Session 6: A Research and Action Agenda for Free Culture
This was the most important session for the future of research on free
culture. The aim of the session was to (a) identify future directions
that would be ripe with research challenges but also promising to
yield insight that would be useful to the practice of free culture
advocacy, and (b) make an assessment of the workshop and decide
whether to repeat it and in what format.
The session started with a discussion of potential areas of research,
where the collection of more data and the visualization of this data
for intuitive exploration and communication of findings was proposed
as one potential area of focus. Action research was also mentioned as
a methodology that would be relevant in the context of practice-
inspired and practice-informed research. Global-scope studies and
comparative studies across multiple jurisdictions were also favored by
some participants as areas needing much more development. But the
discussion quickly turned to practical issues, such as how to organize
a network for continuous communication and collaboration among
interested researchers and whether we should plan a journal special
issue, or a special track in an existing research conference.
Participants tried to propose solutions to the perennial problem of
engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations while at the same time
being respected in one's own scientific community. There was some
consensus that we should not attempt to create a new discipline, but
that we nevertheless need venues and opportunities to engage in cross-
disciplinary dialogue and do research across disciplinary boundaries,
as the phenomena that interest us the most tend to cut across multiple
dimensions of the Internet, including law, IT, economics,
communications, media studies and policy (just to name a few).
The most concrete and positive outcome of the entire workshop was the
unanimous agreement of all participants to the idea of repeating this
gathering on an annual basis. Epitomizing the positive assessment of
this year's proceedings was Lawrence Lessig's proposal to help find a
venue for the workshop next year and also to help turn it into a
larger and more substantive academic conference, a proposal that was
greeted with enthusiasm by the rest of the participants in the session.
The rest of the discussion focused on what the envisioned conference
should look like, in light of the lessons we learned from Free Culture
2008. It was tentatively agreed to raise the bar for participation at
the conference next year by requiring that presenters submit a full
paper at some stage in the process (this year it was optional and
selection was based solely on extended abstracts). This, along with
having more time dedicated to research presentations and research-
focused discussion will help ensure that next year's event will be
more focused and session participation will be more consistent, which
will be essential to building rapport and promoting genuine dialogue
among participants.
Some participants also voiced concerns with respect to the conference
potentially attaining too much of a traditional academic character and
losing the relative spontaneity and participatory nature of the
iSummit. It was therefore suggested that we maintain some slots for
open discussion and seek to synthesize perspectives and findings in
the form of panels or by any other means, instead of focusing only on
single-person presentations. Finally, several potential publishing
venues were brought up but it was agreed that it is somewhat premature
to be concerned with this at the moment and we should rather focus our
energies in planning Free Culture 2009. The following participants
registered their interest in assisting with the organization of next
year's conference (in no particular order):
Wolf Richter
Lawrence Lessig
Juan Carlos De Martin
Alek Tarkowski
Leah Belsky
Ben Bildstein
Christopher Adams
Rachel Cobcroft
Prodromos Tsiavos
Giorgos Cheliotis
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