A World of Open

WordPress 3.x and Slide-O-matic “technology” break WPaudioplayer

Peter Troxler — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 17:59:51 +0000

So you have to suffer from standard WP theming wile I try to fix what probably is down to scripting issues … see why I hate programmers?

(Un)limited Design Talk – Open Design (raw recording)

Peter Troxler — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:11:32 +0000

This is the raw recording of what ended up in those two posts:

(Un)limited Design Talk – Open Design – Part 1: What is Open Design

Peter Troxler — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:12:03 +0000

(Un)limited Design Talk with (from left) Michelle Thorne, Ronen Kadushin, Bas van Abel, Roel Klaassen, Jeanne Tan and others

The (Un)limited Design Talk took place on Friday, the 11th of June, during the DMY Maker Lab at the International Design Festival DMY in Berlin. The topic was Open Design and its potential, host was Jeanne Tan, editor at design.nl. This is part 1.

Participants were: Roel Klaassen from Premsela, the Dutch platform for design and fashion; Bas van Abel from Waag Society, a new media think tank; Ronen Kadushin from Berlin, himself a proponent if not the inventor of open design; Michelle Thorne, from Creative Commons where she works as an International Project Manager out of Berlin; Matt Cottam, Amsterdam, co-founder of Tellart, an international design consultancy; Jay Cousins, a thinker, doer, meddler and tinkerer based in Berlin; Aart Helder, also from Premsela, and other members of the audience, including myself.

Music: Illusion by Maersk from MCRP V1 by The Monome Community; available at http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/track/illusion.

Part 1: What is Open Design
Part 2: The Future of Open Design

(Un)limited Design Talk – Open Design – Part 2: The Future of Open Design

Peter Troxler — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:11:53 +0000

(Un)limited Design Talk with (from left) Michelle Thorne, Ronen Kadushin, Bas van Abel, Roel Klaassen, Jeanne Tan and others

Music: Illusion by Maersk from MCRP V1 by The Monome Community; available at http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/track/illusion.

Part 1: What is Open Design
Part 2: The Future of Open Design

Tangled in Legal

Peter Troxler — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:21:38 +0000

The (business) world is looking for protection of ideas: patents, copyright, trade marks, licenses, rights management — legal instruments pretending to preserve the opportunity of exploitation to the original inventor, author, creator, giving them the opportunity to sue anybody taking — stealing! — intellectual property and turning it profitably into a business.

Is that how the world, how business works? In this opinion peace I propose that copyright owners too often and too easily get tangled in the prospects of easy legal protection, spending time, money and energy on something that is most probably less efficient than any attempt at selling the stuff themselves.

Due to be out in 2010.

Introduction to Ardour – FLOSS Manual now online

Peter Troxler — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:10:32 +0000

Ardour (Photo by Paul (W) Campbell)

The “Introduction to Ardour” FLOSS Manual is a free (gratis/libre) tutorial-style book, which introduces the program without expecting a vast knowledge of computers or sound editing from the reader. This FLOSS Manual was largely written by workshop participants learning the software themselves, over a one week period during a session led by Derek Holzer at the moddr_lab/WORM in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Ardour is a full-featured, free and open-source hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation program suitable for professional use. It features unlimited audio tracks and buses, non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undo, and anything-to-anywhere signal routing. It supports standard file formats, such as BWF, WAV, WAV64, AIFF and CAF, and it can use LADSPA, LV2, VST and AudioUnit plugin formats.

This FLOSS Manual can be read online at: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ardour/

Non-profit, print-on-demand paper copies can be ordered from Lulu.com soon. Please check back with the main FLOSS Manuals page in several days for ordering information: http://en.flossmanuals.net/

The manual is free to use, distribute and remix according to the GNU General Public License. FLOSS Manuals volunteers are currently working on French and Portuguese translations, and anyone is free to add contributions and edits for future versions of the manual at http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Ardour/WebHome

Thanks to Adam Hyde, Walter Langelaar, the workshop participants in Rotterdam as well as those who helped online from the FLOSS Manuals, Ardour and Linux Audio communities, and to all the folks at the moddr_lab and WORM!

Indaba: CC clips library

Peter Troxler — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:32:28 +0000

Indaba Music launches audio clips library with over 8,000 CC-licensed samples and loops: http://www.indabamusic.com/clips

The clips database is searchable by musical key, tempo, tonality, time signature, license type and source.

Introduction to “Free” [DE]

Peter Troxler — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:18:06 +0000

SWR 2 (Südwest-Rundfunk, Germany) has a feature about the paradigm change and the notion of “free” at the beginning of the digital age.

From the liner notes:

(…) Denn die Vision einer freien digitalen Kultur rüttelt am Wertesystem, das sich auf den Buchdruck gründet und aus geistigen Werken besteht, die oft nur Einzelne besitzen. Sie verweist auf eine überlieferte Metapher: Die jeweils lebende Generation steht auf den “Schultern von Riesen”. Das heißt, alle Menschen schöpfen unentwegt aus dem kulturellen Erbe und arbeiten mit ihren Ideen und Werken daran weiter.

The feature (in German) is available here as an MP3 file (no streaming), and SWR 2 also lets you have the script (by Sebastian M. Krämer). However, the feature itself is not free.

Open Design (Dutch Design Week 2009) [NL]

Peter Troxler — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:28:35 +0000

Draadijesketting by Aafke Kauffman

As the World of Open is expanding beyond the borders of pure content designers in the Netherlands have gathered for the (Un)limited Design Contest. Numerous designs have been developed and published under a Creative Commons license*. On Friday, 23 October 2009, the lucky winners of the contest were announced at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. There is also an exhibition of the best designs. A World of Open reports from the show. [in Dutch]

Details over the (Un)Limited Design Contest can be found on its website http://unlimiteddesigncontest.nl/

De winnende designs zijn:

in de categorie Food: Ellen Bokkinga met ‘Amuse vijf’
in de categorie Form’: Alexander Rulkens met ‘Magic Box’
in de categorie Fashion: Goof van Beek met ‘Hexagonale papieren jurk’

Binnenkort zijn deze designs bij 0900-Design te koop.

Interviews with the winners Ellen Bokkinga, Alexander Ruklens and Goof van Beek, with Bas van Abel van Waag Society, initiator of the (Un)Limited Design Contest, and designer Jos Oberdorf (npk design) en Gino van Roeyen (Banning Advocaten).

The music used in this edition is Slap Open by Chriss, avaliable under a Creative Commons BY-Share Alike licence.

* The license is the attribution-non commercial-share alike license.

Registries and the Public Domain

Peter Troxler — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:41:04 +0000

How can a potential user determine if a work is actually in the public domain? What involves substantial detective work could become an easy task in the future, if some of the initiatives on certification and registration of works will come to fruition. A session at the 2008 Communia Workshop in Amsterdam discussed the need for tools that can be used to mark and tag works supposedly being in the public domain. After the session I took the opportunity to discuss the roles of registries with Mario Pena of Safe Creative and Martin Springer of osAlliance and Registered Commons. Now we are catching up with the developments that happened in the meantime.

Upcoming Podcast, scheduled for 2010