project

Making attribution work

One of the problems with using as many Creative Commons licensed images as I do is creating and maintaining a system so that I am able to attribute the right picture to the right creator in the right way.

This is why I’m excited about the project Commons Machinery that promises to make my life much easier.

Commons Machinery is building infrastructure in support of the Commons. Our aim is to make the use of digital works as easy as possible by developing new technology built on open standards for licensing, attribution and provenance.

So support Commons Machinery and make attribution (and life) easier.

Posted on by mklang

Counterfeiting in Vienna

Right now I am in Vienna, sitting in a project meeting on Counterfeiting as part of the EU project Counter which is a research project is designed to collect data, generate knowledge and disseminate findings on the European landscape for the consumption of counterfeit consumer goods. So today is full of interesting discussions with smart people in a beautiful city. More on the meeting later.

Vienna is a beautiful city and right now it is wearing a full set of Christmas deocrations and you cannot walk far before running into a Christmas market selling local wares, sweets and Gluwine. The only downside is the lack of stable Internet access so uploading photos will have to wait.

Posted on by mklang

Support a photography project

I read about this photography project on Boing Boing and thought it was worth the advert on this blog. Giving alternative groups of people access to photographic technology leads to the production of exciting new material.

Los Angeles-based photographer and blogger Dave Bullock says:

The Skid Row Photography Club‘s first show, The Beauty of the Street, premiered last Thursday during the Downtown Art Walk. The participants were ecstatic to see their beautiful work on the walls and the hundreds of people who came into the gallery loved what they saw.The SPRC started as an idea I “borrowed” from the movie Born Into Brothels . I wrote a proposal to the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council to buy digital cameras which we then gave to people living in Skid Row. I gave the participants brief lessons in composition and turned them loose. For the last six months we’ve met every Tuesday at UCEPP in Skid Row.

During that time they shot over 20,000 photos between them. An amazing body of work ranging from flowers to architecture to a man defecating in the middle of the street.

Dave asks if any Boing Boing readers might want to donate digital cameras to folks living in Skid Row, so they might extend the project. “The cameras we’ve been using are about $200 each,” he explains. “We’re just a club, not a non-profit as of yet.”

More info here on how you can participate. The short version: if you would like to donate digital cameras please email Dave directly at eecue@eecue.com.

Skid Row, in case you don’t know, is a massive, permanent homeless encampment in downtown Los Angeles — the largest such community in the United States. About 8-9,000 homeless people live there. This “heat map animation” provides a compelling visualization of the site, though data hasn’t been updated in a while.

Posted on by mklang

Positive Procrastination

While procrastination is often seen as a negative act it does have a positive side. Of course if the procastination we enjoy turns out to be positive and leads to a result – is this really procrastination at all? Hmm an academic Zen koan… but I digress and possibly procrastinate.

Since returning to Göteborg from my Open Access project in Lund there has appeared a small window of opportunity to begin doing something more substantial and long term. So based upon this premise I happily ignore a bunch of more pressing, but smaller, tasks in order to create a meaningful long term project.

Thus far I have located and area, a vague plan of action, a whole bunch of related work and now I am formulating a thesis to be presented, argued and defended. So with the risk of jinxing the project by talking about it at this early stage my idea is to write a book (not very original since I am an academic) on the connection between copyright, culture and innovation.

There! It’s out now. So all I need to do now is to fine tune the thesis and begin purposely bashing the keyboard. Who said that procrastination is all bad?

From Bizzaro by Piraro

Posted on by mklang

CC photos of Göteborg on Flickr

Flickr has over 2 billion images – that’s a lot. If you type in the search term ”Göteborg” – my home town – suddenly you have the more manageable number of 66 804 hits. Of these 13 820 images are available under one of the six Creative Commons licenses which allow others to reuse the images.

The reason I know these numbers is that I have been doing some preparatory work for a project. I have looked through the 13 820 images and chosen 279 of them.

Posted on by mklang