IT Law Journal

administrator January 14th, 2008

iCommons: iSummit 2007

This article combines the iCommons documents found at the iCommons website: “iSummit07.” http://www.icommons.org/isummit07, “Our Hosts.” http://www.icommons.org/isummit07/hosts/, and “About.” http://www.icommons.org/about/

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Image: “iCommons.” © 2008. Berne Guerrero. Some Rights Reserved. The derivative work is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 PH http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ph/. All source images from Mecredis / Fred Benenson. “iCommons 2007.” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/565027189/); (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/551480041/); “@ Lazareti.” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/551490055/); “Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain.” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/555983182/); “Kevin Driscoll.” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/573125672/); “Star Wreck.” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/551865834/); (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/551868702/); “img_2151.jpg.” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/557891015/); (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/551260858/); “Yochai Benkler.” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fcb/556026542/). CC BY-SA 2.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Background

“We are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice and productivity in the information society. How we shall live in this new environment will in some significant measure depend on the policy choices that we make over the next decade or so. To be able to understand these choices, to be able to make them well, we must recognize that they are part of what is fundamentally a social and political choice ‘ a choice about how to be free, equal, productive human beings under a new set of technological and economic conditions.” (Yochai Benkler: “The Wealth of Networks”)¹

From students protesting against DRM in the streets of Zurich, Seattle, Paris and New York,² to Viacom’s recent $1 billion lawsuit³ against YouTube⁴ (Google)⁵ for copyright infringement, we are living through what Benkler calls a ‘period of perturbation’ where the ways in which society organizes itself are ‘up for grabs’.

In this state of flux, the free Internet finds itself at a crossroads. Recent threads suggest that what started as an open, neutral network which enabled widespread innovation and creativity by individuals and communities throughout the globe, has developed to a point where in the next 10 years or so, decisions need to be made about whether the Internet retains its network neutrality or whether the industrial giants force us back into consuming a culture that is ‘ready-made’ rather than being able to produce our own information environment (Benkler).

The iSummit 2007

The iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia brought together pioneers of the free Internet to make sure that, at its crossroads, we guide the world along a path that will enable the kind of free culture and decentralized innovation that has characterised the early years of the Internet.

With a focus on both ‘big ideas’ and practical examples of how open sharing on the Internet is driving business development, increased innovation, quality education and advances in science, the iCommons Summit was a must-attend for the pioneers with a stake in how the Internet must evolve in the future.

With an impressive lineup of iconic free Internet philosophers, we heard from people like Creative Commons⁶ CEO, Larry Lessig,⁷ CC Chairman and Digital Entrepreneur, Joi Ito,⁸ Wikipedia⁹ Founder, Jimmy Wales¹⁰ and CTO of Linden Labs,¹¹ Cory Ondrejka.¹² We also added some new voices to the debate in 2007, including India’s Lawrence Liang¹³ who has become renowned for his considered commentary on the positive impact of piracy in developing countries, Jonathan Zittrain¹⁴ discussed themes from his new book ‘The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It’, Benjamin Mako Hill¹⁵ from MIT¹⁶ spoke about competing visions of ‘free culture’ from the free software perspective, and Becky Hogge¹⁷ from the Open Rights Group,¹⁸ who discussed successful campaigns to rid the world of restrictive IP laws.

Apart from the insight of the great ‘philosophers of the commons’, the Summit also brought together practitioners, activists and technologists working on concrete projects that continue to inspire us about the possibilities of a free culture on the Internet. In these workshops, leaders of the open education movement seeded new ideas for global cooperation, and participants shared insights on how open content is planned, strategised and built from the ground up. We shared ideas on how to curate open content using tools like del.icio.us and concepts like ‘crowd sourcing’ and ‘peer production’. And we shared experiences on how to increase government use of open access licensing for publicly-funded materials, and looked at new opportunities to fund open content using alternative business models.

And when the sun set in Dubrovnik, the Summit hosted a series of concerts by local musicians, screenings of open movies from around the world and an exhibition by six of the world’s most innovative artists exploring concepts of shared ownership and distributed creativity.

Lessons Learned

Everyone who builds the commons has something important to contribute. The education track, facilitated by Allen Gunn and Mark Surman, took this idea to its obvious conclusion, facilitating an enormously successful stream and emerging with a new community of individuals committed to establishing a working partnership and with a plan of action to follow over the coming months.

Humility of leadership paves the way for global ownership of the commons. When Larry Lessig invited the emerging leadership of the commons community to take the reigns and diversify intellectual leadership around free culture, he showed a rare humility that he will be remembered for in the stories about this movement.

Games are great way to build new alliances among the global commoners. A new issue entered the commons arena this year – that of poker and the opportunities for the playing of poker to encourage critical thinking, strategic thinking and encourage cross-cultural understanding – all important skills in understanding how to facilitate the revolution in commons-based peer production around the world.

Respect and understanding of the vast economic divides that affect the commons is vital to our global strategy. Lawrence Liang invited members of the “legal commons” to begin to understand how the problems of infrastructure are being solved by piracy where the “third world city meets the world of new media.” Liang invited those who believe that the battle to free culture can only be solved using legal means to recognise and respect those who have developed a free culture outside the law, and how this fight will have different parameters in different parts of the globe.

We need to get creative about inclusion. USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy and Linden Lab showed us how to include an extra 500 people in the conference by streaming keynotes and accepting questions from an audience in Second Life. A mentorship programme by Creative Commons International affiliates initiated at the Summit will hopefully add support to country affiliates, but we need to do much more to enhance inclusion by people from Africa and other developing countries.

The iSummit is 95% community and 5% technology. As the community gets involved in building new programmes and developing the format of the event, we are starting to see something that is truly revolutionary.

The iSummit was co-hosted by the Multimedia Institute (MI2) in Croatia. The MI2’s activities range from informal education and training in technology and digital media, free software development, archiving and publishing of digital and print media, cultural management and content curation, and policy and advocacy work.

About iCommons

Incubated by Creative Commons, iCommons is an organisation with a broad vision to develop a united global commons front by collaborating with open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world.

Using the annual iCommons Summit as the main driver of this vision, iCommons will feature projects that encourage collaboration across borders and communities, and promote the tools, models and practice that facilitate universal participation in the cultural and knowledge domains. The Summit will collaborate with organisations and communities from around the world to demonstrate and share best practice and discuss strategies for continuing the positive impact that ’sharing’ practices are having on participation in the cultural and knowledge domains.

During the year iCommons will incubate projects that cross borders and unite commons communities, acting as a platform for international collaboration towards the growth and enlivening of a global digital commons.

Thanks to scholarships provided by the commons community, through Creative Commons International, Atty. Jaime N. Soriano and Atty. Michael Vernon M. Guerrero were able to attend the iSummit conference in Croatia.

1. http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page [↩]
2. http://wiki.freeculturenyu.org/wiki/index.php?title=DRM_Protest [↩]
3. http://lessig.org/blog/archives/003734.shtml [↩]
4. http://www.youtube.com/ [↩]
5. http://www.google.com/ [↩]
6. http://creativecommons.org/ [↩]
7. http://lessig.org/blog [↩]
8. http://joi.ito.com/ [↩]
9. http://wikipedia.org/ [↩]
10. http://blog.jimmywales.com/ [↩]
11. http://lindenlab.com/ [↩]
12. http://lindenlab.com/management [↩]
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Liang [↩]
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Zittrain [↩]
15. http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/ [↩]
16. http://web.mit.edu/ [↩]
17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becky_Hogge [↩]
18. http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ [↩]

• ITLJ 4-1
• Comments(1)