commons | Peter Bihr

Ronen Kadushin, folding chairs

06-12-2010

“Recent Uploads” – Exhibition Opening from annika. on Vimeo.

My friend and extraordinary open designer Ronen Kadushin (see these blog posts) recently had a vernissage for his new exhibition called “Recent Uploads”.

Ronen says:

Each chair drawe its inspiration from different narratives: design references, emotional states, city life, and street art. (…) The chairs are laser cut from a 6mm aluminum sheet, and bent and assembled by hand. Bending a piece this thick is made easy using a hallmark detail I formulated a few years back; (…) The designs of the chairs were recently uploaded onto my website for anyone to copy, produce or experiment with.

In the video above, you can see how Ronen assembled (or rather: folded) a number of his open design chairs from a flat sheet of metal. It’s pretty amazing, really.

The designs are realeased under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-sa), so you can download and cut them yourself, or buy the complete pieces at Appel Design Gallery, Berlin.

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Interview: Mark Surman (Mozilla Foundation)

By: Peter Bihr

28-10-2010

collaboration, commons, conference, education, interview

Mark pic by Kate

Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation and program chair of Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival, kindly gave me an interview about Drumbeat and why the Open Web is so relevant.

In three sentences: What is Drumbeat?

Mozilla Drumbeat Ok. Three sentences. I’ll try 1. Mozilla exists to make sure the internet stays open and awesome. 2. With Drumbeat, we’re moving beyond Firefox to build more things that make the web better — not just software. 3. We’re doing this by reaching out new kinds of people — teachers, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists.

Why is that important?

It’s important because these people — in fact all of us — will have an impact on the future of the web, on what the web becomes.

If we care about the internet for the long run, that means getting people like educators involved in shaping the web in their world. Especially educators who are trying to disrupt and innovate. We can give them open web tools and thinking to help do this, which in turn helps the education web move in the right direction — towards something open, free and hackable.

This same scenario plays out with journalists, artists, filmmakers and so on. We want to help the innovators in these spaces take best advantage of the web, get them on board as our allies.

Which fields is Drumbeat focusing on?

Education and cinema are the two places we’ve put the most attention on in the first year. You can look at:

P2PU School of Webcraft, where we’re helping to build a free online school where web developers teach each other.

And Web Made Movies, a lab where filmmakers and engineers work together invent new kinds of web films.

These are examples of the kinds of things we want to do with Drumbeat. There are dozens more small projects brewing. I think you’ll see some the ones in journalism and art grow bigger next year.

In November you’re planning the Drumbeat Festival. What’s that?

It’s a crazy event where 400 people come to talk about the connections between learning, freedom and the web. And make things. And have fun.

More concretely: we have working on everything from web developer education to open text books to hackerspaces coming. And alot of tech and open source people. The ideas for them to find ways to shape the future of learning together.

It’s meant to be the first of many events like this, where we invite the the kind of people we’d like to bring into Drumbeat, find ways to work together and to work with each other.

Next year, we’ll likely have a different theme. Maybe ‘media, freedom and the web’?

How can the rest of us get involved?

It really depends what your interested in. If you are an educator or filmmaker, the projects I’ve mentioned above are easy entry points. And there will be more entry points in places like journalism, art, etc. coming very soon. Same goes if you’re a web developer or engineer who wants to help on projects like these.

More broadly than this, there want to do local Drumbeat events and a online activities and challenges that almost anyone can get involved in. We toyed with this in 2010, but really plan to go bigger with them next year.

Drumbeat Festival is from Nov 3-5 at Barcelona. The (already pretty sweet) program is further developed in the Wiki. Register for Drumbeat Festival here.

The interview was first published on netzpiloten.de under a CC by-nc-sa license. Photo by Mark Surman (some rights reserved).

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Covering DLD Conference with Berlinblase

By: Peter Bihr

16-01-2010

blogging, commons

Together with the Berlinblase crew I’ll be heading down to Munich next week to cover Burda’s DLD Conference. (Full disclosure: paid gig.) Needless to say, I was thrilled to hear that the DLD team invited us down as the official live bloggers. It’ll be four of us – Florian Krakau (@dotdean), Johannes Kleske (@jkleske), Igor Schwarzmann (@zeigor) and I.

We’ll be blogging all three conference days, 24-26 Jan. You’ll find our coverage here and on the conference website.

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Support Creative Commons (Campaign)

By: Peter Bihr

12-10-2009

campaigns, commons

As you might know, I’m a big fan of Creative Commons (CC), a very easy way to share your content online and thus contribute to an ever-growing pool of freely available body of text, picture, videos and music to work with. It’s not a replacement to copyright, but an addition that gives the content creators (that’s you) more rights to share their works and others more rights to use them. Creative Commons is a building block for a free culture.

A few days ago, the annual fundraiser campaign has kicked off. As you can imagine, like many industries, non-profits like Creative Commons have also been hit hard by the economic crisis as they have to rely on donations both by institutions and individuals.

Before getting into the details, though, a quick intro video for those of you not familiar with Creative Commons. A good place to start is the video “A Shared Culture” by filmmaker Jesse Dylan, known for the “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video:

A few brief examples how Creative Commons is relevant to my work:

Practically all the images used in this blog are licensed under CC. The blog itself is licensed under CC – with one of the most liberal licenses (CC Attribution). Anybody can use all the content that I created here as long as they point out who it’s from (that’s the “attribution” part), no matter if for non-commercial or commercial uses.
My photos on Flickr are all licensed under a slightly more restrictive license (CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike), which means anyone can use them as long as they point to me as the creator, but they may only use them in a non-commercial context (because I wouldn’t want a friend of mine ending up in some kind of commercial or anything along those lines), and as long as they share the work based on my photos under similar conditions (thus also contributing to the growing pool of available works).
In practically every client project I argue for sharing as much as possible on the web, and usually a Creative Commons license is the easiest, most reliable (and most legally sound) way of doing so.

For different kinds of uses and content, Creative Commons offers me the chance to pick just the right license and keep the rights I want to keep while giving up the ones that aren’t important to me. That’s the main difference between the old model you know from old-school copyright aka “all rights reserved”. With Creative Commons, it’s “some rights reserved”.

The official fundraiser kick-off post has the details on the campaign (and a neat CC shirt motif), Joi Ito has some more background.

So what can you do to support a free culture? You can spread the word, share your content (thus enabling others to build on it while also building your reputation), or donate cash, which helps fund the (small) organization behind the scenes:

Here’s more ways and hands-on tipps on how to support Creative Commons and spread the word. Thanks for your contribution.

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Hack Your Chair (Open Design Chair)

By: Peter Bihr

15-09-2009

commons, design

Ronen Kadushin‘s works blow my mind over and over again. Ronen is a Berlin-based designer, mostly he works on furniture. The twist: It’s all open-sourced & released under a Creative Commons license. You can take his designs, copy them, remix them, hack them. It’s yours for the taking. And more importantly, it always looks awesome, as top-of-the-line designer furniture sometimes just does. (WIRED loves it, too.)

One of the design principles here is not to use joints: Joints are complex, hard to reproduce. They would make those designs de facto impossible to hack, manipulate and clone. Designing along more simple patterns helps to keep the works not just open source by the words, but by the spirit of open source. All you see here can actually be reproduced fairly easily.

To get a better idea of the process, check out these these photos (after the jump).

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Fair Trade Music Label

By: Peter Bihr

13-07-2009

commons, digital rights, media

We prefer to know if our coffee & food was produced organically and if the farmers got their fair share, so we buy products that carry a Fair Trade certificate. But what about our music? Ever so often music labels are criticized for ripping off their contracted artists. Well, let’s see if that’s true. Let’s give an incentive for labels to pay their artists well and treat them fairly.

Could a Fair Trade Music label or certificate be the solution?

What is Fair Trade?

Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalised producers and workers – especially in the South. Fair Trade organisations (backed by consumers) are engaged actively in supporting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional international trade.

Why not use this definition for Fair Trade Music, too:

Fair Trade Music is a music production and trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in music production and trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better music production and trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, music producers and workers – especially in Major Labels. Fair Music Trade organisations (backed by consumers) are engaged actively in supporting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional music production and trade.

Is there already any initiative out there?

(And could someone please come up with a better name, and a logo?)

Update: There’s this initiative called fair-trade-music.de, but the website seems poorly maintained. Is this still active? (Thanks Martin!)

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New license for this blog (now CC by licensed)

By: Peter Bihr

02-05-2009

commons

I just watched RIP – A Remix Manifesto at a screening at NYU and was stoked, and more importantly, realized once more how important it is to share your stuff as freely as possible. So I decided to put this blog (so far under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license) under the even less restrictive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC by). That means you can do with it whatever you want – no matter if it’s non-commercial or commercial – as long as the source is made clear.

Not that I produce anything as cool (or remixable) as the music shown in the film, or think that what I’m writing here is overly valuable. But if there’s anybody out there who wants to use it for anything, be my guest. As long as you reference my work, go for it.

Also, if you haven’t watched RIP, do it right now. Here’s the trailer:

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Peter Bihr

Ronen Kadushin, folding chairs

Interview: Mark Surman (Mozilla Foundation)

Covering DLD Conference with Berlinblase

Hack Your Chair (Open Design Chair)

Fair Trade Music Label

New license for this blog (now CC by licensed)

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