Wizards of OS - Blog

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…)

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.

== please redistribute ==

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

Not even 60 days to go before the Wizards of OS 4. This time it will take place in Columbia Hall, one of Berlin‘s greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll venues, so WOS4 is bound to rock. In fact, netlabels and how they manage to make a buck with free bits is going to be one of WOS4’s featured topics. Some of the most knowledgeable people in the field including book authors Janko Roettgers and Mo Sauer, and Magnatune’s John Buckman will be discussing this fascinating new phenomenon. It will give us ample opportunity to rock your minds and bodies, not the least at the free music netlabel parties. (more…)

In time for reviewing what was wos3 before wos4 starts two months from now, the full video and audio recordings of the wos3 panels are now online. Navigate from schedule or panel list. Thank you Stream Team for recording, thank you Roland for encoding, thank you Paul for uploading.

Space and date of WOS4 have been fixed. The first speakers have confirmed, among them Lawrence Lessig, Claudio Prado and Yochai Benkler. If you like to contribute to the discussion leading up to the conference, join us on the WOS mailinglist.