by Tony Curzon Price at the iCommons summit 2007
June 13 2007
The philosophy panelists - Tom Chance, Dave Berry and Benjamin Mako Hill - brought to the open some of the rumblings set off by Lessig's keynote definition of what iC and CC are for.
Dave Berry set up the opposition of the dwelling that the Free Software movement has created against the database that Creative Commons has created. Can iC/CC aspire to be a movement like Free Software, with its passionate sense of belonging and its spectacular impact on the world? Or is it - at the opposite extreme as characterised by David Berry - a way of supplying free labour to Web 2.0 capitalism?
There were as many desires to express opinion as people in the room, so the debate continues on the iCommons site node.
This morphed during the day into the organisational question: iCommons movememnt or cadre organisation? Does iCommons have Stallman envy?
Yes and no. Larry Lessig responded in a realistic tone at the philosophy session: cultural production is not like software production, because it does not have a single purpose. Free Software has a purpose and unity that is created by compilers that run cross-processors.
Where is the dwelling of ``free culture''? It is in each specific act of cultural production: from every local band to the writers' groups to the biennale or Covent Garden. Is there any reason to unite the Free Culture parts of production under one purpose - to make Free Culture itserlf a cultural product, not an object of study?
That is what iCommons wants to do. I started these posts with the question: ``What is iSummit for''? It is here to support Free Culture, but also to unite Free Culture by giving it an identity. This purpose is being physically realised in its ambitious new web site, which aims to be a sort of cross between Sourceforge and Slashdot. It aims to bring under one domain representations of free culture production, while also distributing the goods of community - like visibility in the Free Culture world - according to a karmic currency.
We look forward, at openDemocracy, to being an active part of this.
tony curzon price 2007-06-16
