Walled Garden: Communities & Networks post Web2.0
Tomorrow Open Images will attend Walled Garden, a two-day conference in Amsterdam. From their website:
This international working conference will approach the development and future challenges of the current Web 2.0 through exploration, experimentation and exchange of knowledge. Our goal: a blueprint for policy makers, funders and practitioners that works towards a public garden.
Walled Garden will address issues of identity, mobile communities and networks by focussing on the tendency towards online gated and closed communities. How does this affect the accessibility of information and knowledge?
Now is the time to identify success factors and failures of Web 2.0 and to imagine and initiate new tools and strategies for the future Web. Our Walled Garden will be explored through conversations in form of structured group dialogue, open plenary sessions, discussions and face-to-face meetings with artists, researchers, theorists and technologists.
To get an idea of what we hope to gain from this conference, this is our participation statement:
Why Open Images should participate at Walled Garden?
As part of Images for the Future – the largest digitalization operation of audiovisual cultural heritage in Europe – the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland are developing Open Images. The aim of this project is to offer online access to a selection of archive material for creative reuse. Reuse includes remixing of archive footage in new videos. Open Images also supports interlinking with other data sources (like Wikipedia), allowing the easy creation of mashups. Access to the content will be based on the Creative Commons model which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. The ‘open’ nature of the project is underscored by adapting open formats and using open source software. Software resulting from Open Images will also be released under a open source license. Participating within the P2P-Fusion EU co-funded research project the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision is also exploring the ways that peer-to-peer file sharing technology can contribute to the legal distribution and reuse of audiovisual content.
Open Images can be seen as an effort of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision to embrace the means that new media offer to invite a broader audience to get into contact with a selection of its archive – in some eyes a walled garden in the physical world. Paradoxically – or not? – this kind of ‘digital outreach’ could lead to an intimate interaction with audiovisual heritage.
What does Open Images hope to gain from Walled Garden?
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision hopes to contribute to/expand its own knowledge about openness within the cultural heritage sector and beyond. Topics of interest: open content, open source, remix culture, user created content, social media, peer-to-peer
Concluding we would like to stress that we are very happy to be part of the Future Cultural Organisations working group:
The “future cultural organisations” workgroup is a 2 day session in which we will attempt to sketch a fictional organisation using networks as a playground. From the personal experience of the participants, we will try to filter which online services make a difference and what are the pros and cons of online autonomy in the post web 2.0 era.