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This year on August 27-29 the OpenSym conference on open collaboration will take place in Berlin:
The 10th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2014) is the premier conference on open collaboration research and practice, including open access, open data, open educational resources, IT-driven open innovation, open source, wikis and related social media, and Wikipedia research and practice. Learn more about OpenSym 2014 and the OpenSym conference series.
The Call for Papers includes special calls for all these different areas. In addition, I have the honor to co-chair the the doctoral symposium together with Claudia Müller-Birn.
Each track has its own submission site, which you can find on EasyChair. Please select the appropriate track. Submission deadline is April 20th, 2014. The deadline for submitting to the doctoral symposium is June 1st, 2014.
(leonhard)
About three months ago, I blogged about potential explanations for Wikipedia’s diversity problems (see “‘Middle-aged White Guys’“). Last weekend, a truly bordercrossing crowd gathered in Berlin to discuss strategies for addressing these problems at the first Wikimedia Diversity Conference. Due to other commitments I was not able to take part the whole time but I have enjoyed most of the sessions I was able to attend.
Since there is extensive documentation on most of the sessions available online, I will only highlight some of my personal insights:
- In her talk on “Diversifying India through outreach among women“, Netha Hussain emphasized the importance of Wikipedia Zero to increase participation in countries, where mere Internet access is not self-evident. Wikipedia Zero enables mobile access, free of data charges, to Wikipedia in developing countries via cooperations with local internet service providers. While some criticize the initiative because of it being a violation of net neutrality principles (see, for example, this mailing-list discussion), it really seems to be a great opportunity to lower access barriers in poorer countries.
Two weeks ago the First Berlin Symposium on Internet and Society took place in Berlin, celebrating the opening of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Specifically for this event I had prepared a paper on “The Digital Public Domain: Relevance and Regulation” (SSRN), which was presented and then commented upon by Juan Carlos de Martin and Felix Stalder. Both provided very thoughtful criticsm and extensions to the paper, introducing an overall discussion that was very constructive and focused on the issues tackled in the paper.
While I have not managed to blog about the workshop so far, Anne-Catherine Lorrain from the COMMUNIA Association has now provided an extensive summary. There she documents why mapping the public domain empirically is a worthwhile exercise:
The empirical mapping of the public domain should help identifying more precisely the economic relevance of the public domain. The regulation framework applying to the public domain can produce some direct effects on the economy, and more particularly on innovation. As a matter of fact, businesses can suffer genuine legal uncertainty when it comes to identify what is protected by IP rights and what is not. The positive economic impact of content being in the public domain is sometimes already acknowledged in practice. For instance, some patent rights holders can decide to donate patentable inventions in order to create a pre-competitive market. Like the “adjustment process” (Schumpeter), the utility of the public domain to improve competition should be demonstrated, although the question about how this aspect should be echoed within legislation remains.
Besides, her summary features the pink sky over Berlin towards the end of the workshop:
Pink sunset on the Spree behind the Public Domain session speakers from left to right Martin Kretschmer, Leonhard Dobusch, Felix Stadler, Juan Carlos De Martin; picture: Anne-Catherine Lorrain
I can only thank Anne-Catherine very much for providing this great summary and endorse reading the whole transcript.
(leonhard)
Not least because of ongoing research projects in the field of copyright regulation, nearly half of all posts that have been published in this blog so far fall into this category. Among the issues discussed are private regulation in form of digital rights management (“DRM in the Music Industry: Revival or Retreat?“) or alternative licensing (“Alternative Licensing: Subverting or Supporting Copyright?“), copyright abolitionism (“Reflections on Abolitionsm: Copyright and Beyond“), the concept of a cultural flat-rate (“Extending Private Copying Levies: Approaching a Cultural Flat-rate?“), and, of course, piracy (“Internet Piracy: A Perfect Excuse?“).
All of these issues and many more will also be dealt with at the upcoming “3rd Free Culture Research Conference“, which will take place October 9-10, 2010 at Free University Berlin’s School of Business and Economics:
The Free Culture Research Conference presents a unique opportunity for scholars whose work contributes to the promotion, study or criticism of a Free Culture, to engage with a multidisciplinary group of academic peers and practitioners, identify the most important research opportunities and challenges, and attempt to chart the future of Free Culture. This event builds upon the successful workshop held in 2009 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, organized and attended by renowned scholars and research institutions from the US, Europe and Asia.
This year’s conference theme is “Free Culture between Commons and Markets: Approaching the Hybrid Economy?“. Extended abstracts of 1,000 to 1,500 words can be submitted by May 31, 2010 (see “submission process“). Sigrid Quack and myself are proud members of the organizing committee.
(leonhard)
governancexborders.com 