ORG at the Free Culture Forum 2010 in Barcelona
Last week ORG took part in the Free Culture Forum 2010 in Barcelona. Over four days participants intensively and sometimes controversially debated the ways and means of finding “new models of sustainability for the digital era”.
It was great to meet so many people who are committed to change the world we live in and actually have done so. Also impressive to see so many different initiatives from different parts of the world. Take Proyecto Sonidero for example, a Mexican initiative that looks at the social and economic aspects of the Sonidero Movement, which an alternative economy around the country’s popular music.
Another great idea for an alternative business model is kickstarter, a “funding platform for creative projects”. One of these projects is Facebook alternative Diaspora set up by four MIT students. There fundraising target was $10,000, they ended up with twenty times as much.
Overall there has been a great variety of the rather famous social micropayment site Flattr.com set up by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde’s which provides a platform for projects. Users give a small monthly contribution and then decide what projects they want to fund by using ‘flattr buttons’. The money is the distributed to those projects.
A probably less well-known work is the first crowdsourced and Creative Commons feature film, The Cosmonaut. Creaters Riot Cinema invite users to be part of the film, be contributing to the script it writing for it, creating your own trailer or even remix the whole film.
No debate about the Commons without Prof. James Boyle. Although he is not here in person, his ideas or analysis are: data from publicly funded research is publicly available, but the analysis of this data is automatically protected under IPR. And the boundary is shifting in a way that public domain is reduced. Eric Kluitenberg from the Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam emphasised that it is important that we shift that boundary the other way. Reclaim the public domain!
One issue that participants discussed was that of a missing narrative. John Hendrik Weitzmann from Creative Commons Germany said that there is a community of people who know what they are talking about, they know what the problem is and know how to solve it. But we need a more narrative to communicate. Flattr.com is a good example for a narrative.
Another the alternative Creative Commons collecting society John presented. It is called 3CS and has been set up in Germany. Unlike the traditional models in which “artists are being ripped off by labels”, it is for creators only. It aims to be transnational and establish highly automated collecting and reporting processes.
John’s message to the audience was clear: ‘Get all these smart projects off the ground, make videos, use narratives to get it out there. There is now more powerful source than society. Use them!
This post kicks off a small series of blogs about the workshops, panel discussions and debates at the FCF. Watch this space!