Wizards of OS - Blog

Check out the wos4 photos on Flickr (212 right now) and in this blog (99), if you haven’t done so yet. There are some really spectacular ones. Among the ones I like especially are Rasmus Fleischer by SimSullen, fun with the Burn Station by rportrr, Larry Lessig on camera by perspective89, [i.]’s fisheye view of the art & copyright workshop, Fernanda Weiden by netzpolitik.org and the Information Freedom Rules panel by Frank Ronneburg.

If you took photographs and haven’t put them online yet, you can upload them on Flickr and tag them with “wos4,” put them onto your own webspace and send us a link or mail them to me directly so I can include them on the wos blog

The wos stream team has done it! Wos4 was barely over and they’ve made the videos of all the plenary sessions available for download already, in ogg and mp4. Check this out. Thanks guys and girl. Great job, well done!

Late, I know, very late. But many of you have found the live-stream anyway. For the others there is a bit of the Future of Free Software panel left, and then from about 8:15 the Brazil, the Free Culture Nation. And, of course, if you’re around there is more netlabel party fun later in the evening.

On this page we are collecting tools that are useful for participating in activities at WOS4 or that are related to one of the sessions at the conference. E.g. say you’re listening to a talk and want to exchange comments on it with other people in the hall, Gobby is a great tool to do this with. If you know of software that fits this description and that you want other wos participants to know about, please write a comment to this post. A few words on what it does and a download link would make things easier. Thank you.

Hal Faber schreibt in seiner sonntägliche Wochenschau auf Heise News von heute:

…

Warnung: Ab hier wird es extrem parteiisch, seitig und unflach, denn ich mache ausdrücklich Werbung für die Wizards of OS 4, eine der besten deutschen Veranstaltungen, wenn es gilt, einen klaren Kopf in Digitalien zu bewahren. Passend zum Software Freedom Day findet die WOS 4 in Berlin statt. Obendrein ist die Columbia-Halle Heimstätte des Schreibrechts-Wettbewerb. Kurzum, die Konferenz ist ein guter Grund, endlich einmal die richtigen Blues-Akkorde zu lernen. Oder wollen WWWW-Leser etwa nur das theweleitsche Fever in der Interpretation des Nasenflöten-Orchesters hören?

(E)(A)Woke up this mornin’ turned on the news
somebody’s trying to steal the blues.

(A)They try to license E-Major and put my songs in danger
(B)It’s my favourite blues chord soon it ain’t free no more.

Went to O’Malley’s to fetch me some gin
sat down at the bar when i saw him walking in
His name was Tux he gave me a grin
said try open source fella that’s how you win.

cause culture is free and should always be
it’s creative and common for both you and me
let’s share this song so we can get along
let’s share this song so we can get along

Das nächste WWWW berichtet natürlich leif von dieser wunderbaren Veranstaltung. Denn wie heißt es so schön in Digitalien: Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it. Pissen für eine bessere Welt, das hat was. (Hal Faber) / (jk/c’t)

At next week‘s Wizards of OS 4 in Berlin, Wikipedia‘s chief organiser in its first year Larry Sanger will announce, for the first time anywhere, a new encyclopedia project. Sanger who is now Director of Collaborative Projects for the Digital Universe Foundation suggests that his novel approach will provide a solution to the challenge of assessing and improving the quality of openly contributed articles.

The announcement follows recent reports on the German-language Wikipedia introducing a quality-management mechanism whereby new page edits need to be approved by registered users before they become visible to everyone.

In the same WOS4 session on Quality Management in Free Content, Martin Haase, professor of linguistics and board member of Wikimedia Deutschland e.V., will give insights into the intense debate on the Wikipedia mailing lists about who gets to approve edits.

What Sanger‘s alternative is he‘s not saying yet. „One key element of the new project will not be revealed until the talk itself,” but, continues Sanger, „it will, I think, prove to be very exciting to all Wikipedia-watchers.”

If you‘re excited, come to Berlin.

WOS4. Information Freedom Rules, 14-16 September 2006: Quality Management in Free Content, Friday, 15 September 2006, 1 pm, Columbia Club Berlin

== please redistribute ==

Wizards of OS 4
Information Freedom Rules
International Conference
14-16 September 2006
in Columbia Hall Berlin
http://wizards-of-os.org/

Four weeks to go till WOS4. We were thinking about holding a beach volleyball competition during the conference to prevent our joints from becoming rusty from all the sitting and talking and hacking, but if the temperature continues to drop at the current rate we might have to do with snow-ball fights instead.

Fortunately there is a tropical wind blowing into WOS4 from the Southern hemisphere. The digital revolution will definitely not be televised but if we believe Brasil‘s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil it will be tropicalised. (more…)

Der Schreibwettbewerb von sieben Bürgerrechtsorganisationen und von Telepolis ist abgeschlossen. Jetzt haben die Leser das Wort. Entscheiden Sie mit über die beste Story von 10 ausgewählten Einreichungen. Die glückliche Gewinnerin wird auf der WOS4 gekürt.

A network of civil society experts is cooperating over the summer to create a best practice resource site and report on the implementation of the EU Copyright Directive. We will discuss a draft version of the report at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin from 14-16 September, and at the EUCD workshop we are organising on 17 September. Based on feedback in Berlin, we will then create a final report by the end of October.

We already have a significant amount of material up at the EUCD Wiki, see especially the draft of the Best Practice Guide. We would be interested to hear from other copyright experts who would like to contribute further best practice examples from EUCD implementations. The guide is structured so that implementation details are stored on country-specific pages, and particularly good (or bad!) examples are
then referenced from the main report.

Please contact Ian Brown (I.Brown [at] cs.ucl.ac.uk) if you would like to become involved.