Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

commons-research - Re: [Commons-research] Draft report from Free Culture 2008

commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Commons-research mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Dobusch, Leonhard" <Leonhard.Dobusch AT fu-berlin.de>
  • To: "commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org" <commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Commons-research] Draft report from Free Culture 2008
  • Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:07:11 +0200

Dear Giogos and all the others,

as I was not able to make it to the summit this year I really appreciate the
extensive report on what happened.

Besides, I would like to draw your attention on a paper my colleague Sigrid
Quack and I wrote on Creative Commons as a case of transnational private
regulation. The title of the paper is "Epistemic Communities and Social
Movements: Transnational Dynamics in the Case of Creative Commons" and it is
accessible online as a (reviewed) Discussion Paper:

Abstract: http://www.mpifg.de/pu/dp_abstracts/dp08-8.asp
Paper: http://www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp08-8.pdf

Any comments are welcome!

Best,
Leonhard

--
Leonhard Dobusch
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Paulstr. 3 | 50676 Cologne | Germany
http://www.mpifg.de/index_en.asp
Tel.: +49 221 2767 508
Fax: +49 221 2767 555
dobusch AT mpifg.de


________________________________________
Von: commons-research-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[commons-research-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] im Auftrag von Giorgos Cheliotis
[gcheliotis.lists AT gmail.com]
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 17. September 2008 18:17
An: commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org
Betreff: [Commons-research] Draft report from Free Culture 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










Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page