apc.au

apc.au sends hearty greetings and best wishes for a sensational year… We believe that through your support and the work we have contributed to in 2008, somehow hope has fed through to where it is needed most.

Before I get to the “pat ourselves on the back” bit, some of you may have noticed that we have started publishing the description of our acronym, apc. Although we were founded in 1997, we rebranded ourselves as apc.au in 2005 and the expansion to “Advisory, Production, Commons Australia” was quietly launched in this, our 11th year. We are now operating as one of Australia first fully commons-based companies. In short, it means we manage our business in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.

apc.au is guided and motivated in part by a broad commons-based agenda, defined in part by the author and scholar, David Bollier:

The commons is a new way to express a very old idea - that some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good of all. The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come.

The commons consists of gifts of nature such as air, water, the oceans, wildlife and wilderness, and shared assets like the Internet, the airwaves used for broadcasting, and public lands. The commons also includes our shared social creations: libraries, parks, public spaces as well as scientific research, creative works and public knowledge that have accumulated over centuries.

In our first full year as a virtual organisation we have worked on projects in Cape Town, Nairobi, Istanbul, Sarawak, Osaka and Tokyo and presenty, Andrew is writing to you from the small gothic city of Graz, Austria. Projects have ranged from research for the internet video series Home Lands, production on the Sarawak Gone micro-docs, hosting Video Slam at Arts Law Week 2008, video production and presentations at the iCommons iSummit, participation in the first Growing an Australian Commons conference and the Open Spectrum Australia symposium, Quality / Control.

Our record label, Secession Records, also released Andrew’s “5 year in the making” album, Son of Science which we will launch in Melbourne in February.

We have been inspired to have worked on some incredible projects this year. Very special thanks to all the people at Cultural Development Network and City of Melbourne, our colleagues at Open Spectrum Australia, Arts Law Consortium, Creative Commons Clinic and members of the Association for Progressive Communications.

We have participated in an ever increasing range of “commons” related activities and advisories, providing commons-based solutions to open publishing and rights management, from video production to web 2.0 implementations within the cultural development sectors.

We could take up another few screen pages on all the in-between projects and activities, but we won’t. We will, however, encourage you to visit our wikis and blogs, let us know what you’re doing and what we may be able to assist you with in the coming year.

• http://wiki.apc.org.au/
• http://secession-records.org/

And finally, a very special request… in February 2009 we will be hosting a fund-raiser to assist in pulling resources together to complete the Sarawak Gone micro-docs series and to also contribute to a second series dealing specifically with the nomadic Penan of Sarawak. We’ll get details out to you as soon as we have a venue secured, but in the meantime, you can read about the series or make a donation on either http://wiki.apc.org.au/index.php?title=Sarawak_Gone, or http://rengah.c2o.org

All the very best from the “open”, friendly and entirely uncommon team at apc.au…

Andrew & Grant

Many of you may have seen reports that the Australian government wants to establish an Internet filter system to protect Australians from harmful sites. Akin to the Great Firewall of China, this system introduces moral and legal issues as well as slowing down the Internet within Australia, breaking existing systems and simply not working as intended. It will also bring Australia down to the level of China, Iran, Cuba and other regimes that fear the openness and freedoms of information the Internet can bring.

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, is pushing hard to establish this latest step in protecting us from terrorists and the dangers of the Internet. Many comments are being aired related to protecting the children and that anyone who is against such a filter is supporting child pornography. In a chilling indication of the misuse a filtering system could lead to, Senator Conroy’s department has even tried to suppress technical reports critical of the plan.

This proposed system is flawed on three major levels:

• Technical: It slows down the feed, it breaks some applications and it is possible to bypass it
• Legal: If the ISPs are filtering content without laws to support them, they are open to wrongful disconnection and/or wrongful blocking cases
• Ethical: By what standard is content being filtered? Differing religious beliefs and political leanings frequently result in varying moral codes - that which is offensive to me may be perfectly acceptable for you

apc.au believes that this proposed system is an invalid solution to the problem areas of the Internet. Australia should be enhancing existing methods of tracking down illegal content and online criminals rather than trying to find ways to block them. Australia should also be implementing improved education programmes to teach people how to safely make the best use of the freedoms and information the Internet provides rather than attempting to further protect us from ourselves.

We recommend that anyone concerned about the implications of an Australian Internet filtering system should immediately take action about it. In addition to following the issue on the Electronic Frontiers Australia site, an excellent site about the filter is No Clean Feed where they have a great summary of the steps you can take to voice your concerns. Actions range from an online petition to writing a letter to your representatives and calling Senator Conroy. There is also the Australian Web Industry Association’s site called Keep Your Filter Off Our Internet. For further reference to what’s happening in our government, the Open Australia site is a wonderful source of information about your representatives and how to contact them.

If you are concerned about any erosion of the freedoms that the Internet can provide, act now. Don’t just sit around complaining about it or getting upset, tell your representatives what you think.

As we entered spring, and just prior to the fall of all the new Romes, we had been busy with a number of new projects.

We’ve been assisting the Cultural Development Network in an Arts and Disabilities survey, identifying where, how and what services are available within cultural sectors for people generally known to have “access” issues to them. This resulted in a review of tools available for mapping the results, specifically in Victoria, Australia.

We’ve also been looking at pooling web 2.0 technologies for a City of Melbourne project to host cultural events in tandem with the World Out Games to be held in Copenhagen, 2009. We’ve been impressed with the social network platform Ning and the flash based streaming service, Mogulus (who comes up with these names?). We’ve also had a brief discussion with the Cancer Council of Australia on development of an emergent online media strategy.

Given the dire need for alternatives to governance models that just do not work, we’ve been working on a information commons paper to assist in the strategic planning for the global Association for Progressive Communications.

And finally, I’m in Graz, Austria, my video installation, NOTHINGKNOWN, is introducing Austrians to the indigenous people of Sarawak and their lands rights issues.

Some of you may be trying to deal with quality in the media these days. Who can you trust? What information is heresay and what information has some basis in fact?

We are involved with Open Spectrum Australia and they’re hosting a symposium on “a radical new idea that may change the way we use and consume media in the future.” It’s going to be on Friday, October 17th at the State Library of Victoria’s Theatrette. You can find out more about the event at their website posting and, if you want to come along, send an email to info@openspectrum.org.au.

I’m going to be one of the presenters at the symposium and will also be taking part in the afternoon’s workshops to discuss the practicalities of the concepts being raised. It promises to be an interesting day if you’ve got any thoughts about the quality of the media you’re consuming.

Unaware I was being video-taped, I was amused to find my talk at the DIY Video track at iSummit up on YouTube… this piece includes other presentations which were all quite amazing in fact!

We have worked with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Creative Commons Clinic (CC Clinic) since its inception on a number of adventurous projects. Most notably were the two Open Channel Video Slam rights management workshops produced for Arts Law Week 2007 and 2008. Created in association with the CC Clinic and Horse Bazaar, the Video Slams explored the use of Creative Commons licenses in a real production environment, testing their application in a complex mix of re-use content from the world over.

Whether it was Video Slam or any other of the open content initiatives I have been involved with the Creative Commons Clinic have been an invaluable resource and encouragement to my team and I. We are entirely indebted to them for their tireless support and expertise.

That I would blog, or prepare a report at this time, when there are several people dedicated to recording the iSummit is likely an exhausting prospect. Thus, this article, a sampling of articles and reports on the sessions I’d been involved with. Three for now… let’s see how many more turn up before the close of the summit.

Fair and legal reuse of video

Composed by Simon Dingle covering the DIY video session, 31 July, this was a kind of roundtable sharing experiences in the use of CC rights management in various film / screen initiatives.

Grokking the Asia Commons

Simon covers the Asia Commons session, 30 July, that resulted in the following:

• developing case models/studies on the commons
• building a distribution network for asia (e.g. for multimedia contents)
• how to share presentations
• sharing strategies on advocacy

Live Blog: Asia Commons Meeting

I’ve arrived in Sapporo with Sarawak still heavy on my mind. Feeling good though… and optimistic despite the challenges ahead.

I’m here to produce the joint iCommons and APC micro doc, Identifying The Commons. Here’s a brief description:

The notion of what constitutes the commons has broad interpretations. So to does the information commons. This video will enquire into what is considered an information/knowledge commons through a series of short interviews conducted at the 2008 iSummit in Sapporo Japan.

The end result is a video resource for the iCommons and APC, additionally supporting the APC Strategic Priority Scoping paper, Growing the Global Information Commons.

For more information on this project, refer to our uber wiki!

A small team left Kuching for what turned out to be an 18 km trek visiting four remote Bidayuh communities affected by the Bengoh Dam development.

It was epic!

I’d not taken many notes on the trek itself, spending much of my time behind a video camera… and given the context of the trip, there are several stories I could tell.

Should I attempt to recount the forest soon to be drowned, walking into the heart of this region, opening out to me as if I were on a planet best described in detail by the author, Iain M Banks? Or the Kampongs (villages), which, to my urban eyes, were much like an apparition, the first of which could have come from J. G. Ballard’s, The Drowned World.

The Kampongs and the stories inherited there could consume a tome of works unto themselves, but I had little time for listening and with few people around and the focus of our mission being about land rights, it was not possible to absorb at length what will soon be lost.

To give you an idea, a very scant idea of what where I’d been, peruse the photos and these few posts:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew-garton/sets/72057594117560624/
• http://agarton.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/bengoh-eia/
• http://agarton.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/sarawak-going/

Producing the series on a miniDV cam (thanks Paul W) has helped immensely, however, I can see the value in recording straight to disk or memory card for these kinds of projects.

Either way, little to no budget DIY projects are based on the notion that you use what you’ve got and make the most of it. I think you’ll find the results pretty good… at least I’m happy with the material I came back with and now with editing in full swing, the results are starting to talk for themselves.

For information on the series:

• http://wiki.apc.org.au/index.php?title=Sarawak_Gone