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: Giorgos Cheliotis <gcheliotis.lists AT gmail.com>
  • To: commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Commons-research] Draft report from Free Culture 2008
  • Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 01:23:11 +0800

Excellent, yes, we should invite other communities to participate - the more the merrier, especially since the general plan is to make this a larger research event.


On Sep 18, 2008, at 12:39 AM, philipp schmidt wrote:

Hi Giorgios:

Thanks for writing the report, and also for doing most of the work to
make the workshop happen. Even though I could not attend many of the
sessions this year, I agree that it was a success and am confident
that it will grow from here.

Please add my name to the list of people who are committed to helping
organise the next one. As you know, I am in favor of a more "open"
approach to paper submission and review and thinking about how this
could be done in more detail - within this group - is something I look
forward to.

I just came back from WikiSym, where we had very similar conversations
about creating an inter-disciplinary community of researchers and I
invited everyone to participate in the 2009 Free Culture Research
Workshop rather than trying to set up more smaller events. ;-)

Best regards - P

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Giorgos Cheliotis
<gcheliotis.lists AT gmail.com> 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






_______________________________________________
Commons-research mailing list
Commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-research





--
(Jan) Philipp Schmidt
University of the Western Cape, South Africa
United Nations University MERIT
E: phi.schmidt AT gmail.com
B: bokaap.net
_______________________________________________
Commons-research mailing list
Commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-research





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page