A History of Cyber Culture: Beyond Cyberpunk
Beyond Cyberpunk is an interesting collection of historical texts on the “cyber culture”: manifestos, book reviews, and essays on technoculture.
Cyberculture is the lack-of-a-better-word label that is given to the place where computer technology meets popular culture. The current generation of young people have grown up with PCs, LEDs, and MTV. Technology is a seamless part of their lives. Computers are no more foreign to them than transistor radios were to the last generation. As technology has saturated it, youth culture (and avant garde culture) has started to express itself through a “techno-symbiosis” For good AND ill, a new cult of the machine is arising. This is an exciting time where a new domain of cultural expression is being created, debated, and negated. The purpose of this stack is to help fuel this critical debate in the 1990’s.
(Via Boing Boing.)
Booklet on Asian FLOSS/CSO projects
Last January-February I attended the Asia Source event near Bangalore, India. Asia Source was a wonderful meeting of FLOSS and civil society organisation people mostly from around Asia. I got to meet nice people and hear about interesting projects utilizing free software and related technologies (wiki, blogs etc.)
Frederick Noronha has now written a booklet with short articles and interviews covering many of the people and projects present at Asia Source. It is a useful resource for those interested in real-life projects utilising FLOSS in those areas.
Herkko Hietanen on a net radio show
I just listened to the first show on the net radio Radio Free Finland. One of the two guests in the show was Herkko Hietanen, an IP scholar and one of the founders of Electronic Frontier Finland. They talked about Creative Commons, software patents, p2p and the case Lehtovaara. All the shows will be archived on the web site.
Bit nervous, some tech problems but otherwise very fine first show!
Common Cause: Information Between Commons and Property
From the Creative Commons blog:
A new book by author Phillipe Aigrain - “Cause commune : l’information entre bien commun et propriété” (or, in English, “Common Cause: Information Between Commons and Property”) has been released online in French under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Selected extracts in English are also available online. Editions Fayard may be one of the first major mainstream French-speaking publishers to facilitate Creative Commons licenses. Let’s hope it serves as an example to open up more French-speaking (and other) content by mainstream publishers for freedom of use.
The book looks like an interesting foray into the politics of the “information age”. I wish somebody will translate it. Unfortunately, translations are forbidden by the license.
Introduction to FOSS in development
An introductory article “Free and Open Source Software Strategies for Sustainable Information Society”, written by me and Tere, is available as a part of a new book University Partnership for International Development. Finnish Development Knowledge for the interested.
P.S. Just noticed that the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit has a
blog covering many interesting topics, including open source.
