Smári McCarthy

On the train to Norway to participate in GoOpen in Oslo. My talk is entitled Limiting the Open Society here is the abstract

With social media quickly becoming the communications tool of choice many have hailed this as an introduction to an open transparent society. But how open is this open society? Is this new stage in the information society really open or is this an illusion brought about by popular technology? This talk looks at the weaknesses and control mechanisms built into the technology and the different regulations and policies implemented to control our communications.

The GoOpen event has lots of great presenters! I am looking forward to hearing Bente Kalsnes on How open should open data be?, Karin Kosina on Art and Hacking in Syria, Berglind Ósk Bergsdóttir on IMMI – Redefining Free Speech for a Digital Age, Smári McCarthy on The Industrialization of the Internet, Primavera di Filippi on Cloud Computing and Regulatory Policies, Christian Siefkes on Commons-based Peer Production and many many more.

So if you are in the neighborhood you should really drop by!

Not only has Jonas done the work – he even wrote this blogpost which I happily & unashamedly steal. Great Work Jonas!

This is horribly exciting: I’ve been wanting to write more about this for a while now, but we wanted to time the release together with the Nordic Culture Fund. The short story, part of which I’ve leaked before, is that the Society for Free Culture and Software has been granted €49000 in funding for a project to bring Creative Commons to artists. Over the next year, from September 2010 to June 2011 we’ll be organising a series of workshops in some Nordic countries where we will talk about Creative Commons, how to use it, when to use it, and get as many artists as possible to make that first release with a Creative Commons license.

We’ll be organising workshops in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and on the Faroe Islands. The workshops themselves will be around April-May 2011, but we’re going to start already in September this year, and during FSCONS in November, to think about how to best approach newcomers to Creative Commons, prepare materials for the workshops and practice presenting Creative Commons to newcomers.

The society is working on this together with Smári McCarthy (IS), Birita í Dali (FO), Christian Villum (DK), Mathias Klang (SE) and Gisle Hannemyr (NO). The funding comes from Nordic Culture Fund and the Nordic Culture Point, and supplements funding which we’ve received for other projects. In total, we’ll spend around €60000 over the next year on CC activities.

GoOpen Oslo

Great News for the Nordic Commons