Felix Cohen at the iCommons 2007 Summit
A long and exciting day at the iCommons summit today. Despite a late start (I can never get the hang of these pesky time zones!) this mornings workshop on supporting open content through membership campaigning was a success, and you can likely expect to see some of the ideas that we worked on being used in our next membership campaign! Following on from that, I had the chance to lunch with some fascinating people, including the leader of the GlobalLives project, who aim to record 24 hours of the lives of a representative group of people from all over the world and present it (under a Creative Commons licence of course). The project is very exciting, and you can look forward to further links between openDemocracy and the project.
Also excitingly, and somewhat disconnected from the Summit itself, I finally got some hands on time with one of the One Laptop Per Child laptops, an adorably cute green laptop with bunny ears, a screen impossible for adults to open, and the most wonderful screen I have seen on a laptop for a long time. The OLPC project is moving on well, and as a long term supporter it's incredibly gratifying to see it in the flesh and realise it has lived up to all my expectations.
This afternoon I hovered between the Open Business models panel and the Copyright activism workshop. Tony Curzon Price represented his views very strongly in the Open Business model, discussing the same issues he covered in his recent article for our iCommons coverage. Downstairs in the copyright activism session, there was a buzzing room full of people desperate to learn from the wisdom of our very own Becky Hogge, now working with the Open Rights Group, Cory Doctorow, Erik Josefsson (EFF Europe), Karen Banks and Fred Benesson (Open Culture). The room was full of people eager to learn how to campaign more effectively, as well as some deep discussion of the different models of activism that the Commons inspires. Altogether fascinating, and gratifying as always to se ethe passion of free culture advocates. Upstairs in the Open Business models session things had calmed down a little and everzone traipsed of for dinner (or some more swimming in my case!).
I'm attempting to live-blog from the keynote speech from Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain at the moment,but I can't type and engage, so expect more thoughts on this later.
Felix
