Hblog

Of a Free Culture and Collaborative Journeys

Lara and I went to the launch of Larry Lessig's new book, 'Free Culture', last night. It was surprisingly enjoyable, especially because we got to meet a really cool character, Whitney Broussard, a music lawyer from the city who has been actively involved in Creative Commons online discussions, and who will be on a panel with Glenn Brown at Duke Law School's upcoming conference entitled, 'FRAMED!! How Law Constructs and Constrains Culture'. Whitney had some really great ideas about opening up music recordings when they are licensed, and distributing the raw versions so that people can actually track the development of a piece by adding metadata to the uncompressed file. This would be a great experiment in collaboration - something that Creative Commons is becoming increasingly involved in.

Flash Mobs

Craig Perrin told me recently about the 'Flash Mob' phenomenon. According to http://www.flashmob.com/, 'Flash Mobs are seemingly unplanned gatherings of large groups of people that converge in public (or semipublic) places for brief periods of time. All members of a Flash Mob simultaneously converge to form the mob and then quickly disperse again at a given time, all members departing in different directions.' http://xflashmobs.com is a website to help people organise these events - there's even a South African group, called 'Vicious Delicious!

Five-eyed monsters and linking SA blogs

I came across this weblog when one of the writers, Andrew Black, sent me an email after he recognised my name from my blog the other day. It was a wonderful surprise - Andrew debated with me at high school - I've been trying to picture him but I keep seeing him as five-eyed monster (his team thrashed us too many times for me to see him as human). After going on to Google and doing an image search, all I could come up with was a horse and an old man with false teeth - neither of which fit the bill - unless of course Andrew has been the subject of genetic research in the UK in order to make ends meet. But no, Andrew is at Oxford University - and his 'Southern Cross' blog is devoted to South African and UK issues - with some really insightful comments on the Zimbabwe basketcase.

Makes me realise how important it is that we SA bloggers work together and comment on one another's posts in order to really grow the movement - after all, discussion between real people about real issues is more important than rapping your mouth off. On this point, Lessig has started a semi-lively discussion. I'd like to see how BlogAfrica and others deal with this.

The politics of codemaking

Craig Perrin from Collabnet came to talk to the Digital Vision Fellows yesterday. I was riveted. He was talking about how his company has developed a process to harness some of the aspects of codemaking that made open source software projects such as Apache work so well. They have developed an environment called 'SourceCast' that allows for collaboration, knowledge management and software development across publics that may be geographically and/or culturally dispersed. I am always excited when I see how people are attempting to capture the essence of what makes communities thrive and really apply those ideas in a systemmatic way.

It was fascinating to hear Craig outline the politics of codemaking in the open source community and the differences between the 'benevolent dictatorship' model, espoused by Linus Torvald's Linux, and the 'meritocracy' model embraced by projects such as Apache and Open Office.

Talking with Craig, I realised that you need two things for a community project to work: 1. a shared sense of identity and 2. a shared vision for what the community wants to achieve. Craig talked about the idea that it is 'greed, glory and the greater good' that propel us to greater heights. In the open source tradition it's the glory and the greater good that need to be constantly reinforced in order to maintain interest and enthusiasm within the community to achieve the vision that is set out at the project's inception.

As I said to Craig, I don't think that these ideas are limited to software development - they can be applied to art, authorship, music and other 'distributed creativity projects. This is what we're talking about in the Eyebeam's 'Distributed Creativity' mailing list forum which is 'investigating paradigms for artmaking that take advantage of mobile and distributed technologies such as WiFi, Weblogs, Wikis, rich Internet applications, voice over IP and social software'. It's a great forum - and there is lots of interest about South Africa which is always good.