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  • From: Davide Bardone <davide.bardone AT polito.it>
  • To: commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Commons-research] Draft report from Free Culture 2008
  • Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:22:50 +0200

A little typo : my second name is Bardone, not Bardoni :)

Thank you for the report !

Davide

Giorgos Cheliotis wrote:
> 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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>


--
| Davide Bardone
|
| Ph.D. Student
| Internet Media Group / NEXA Center for Internet & Society
| Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica
| Politecnico di Torino
| C.so Duca degli Abruzzi, 24
| 10129 Torino - Italy
|
| Tel. +39 011 564 7219
| Fax +39 011 564 7216
|
| web http://media.polito.it





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