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What measures for success?
Eve Gray · Cape Town (South Africa) · Jun 16th, 2007 11:14 pm · 17 votes · no comments made
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| Away from the rat-race, by Eve Gray |
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What to expect from the opening plenary of a conference that is essentially about copyright? Only a few years ago it would have been a stuffy hall at the London Book Fair, in the dingy surrounds of Olympia on a rainy Saturday in April. The experts in their suits would drone on, assuming the reassuring earnestness of a doctor's bedside manner to tell us how successful they had been in prosecuting the pirates in India and how China was beginning to be copyright observant. The most dramatic we could hope for was an alarmist display of web pages showing the speed and effectiveness of the burgeoning informal online pirate economy.
Not so here at the second iCommons Summit. First of all, iCommons goes for stunning settings – last year on Copacabana Beach in Rio, this weekend in the Revelin Fort on the edge of Dubrovnik old town. This means that we come into the conference hall with the smell of pine resin in our nostrils, slightly dazzled by the brilliance of the white boats in the harbour and early morning sun reflecting off the blond stone of the old city. What we were treated to when we got inside was a bravura display from a movement that in one brief year is displaying a new confidence in the success of its alternative creative vision.
The beautiful settings hide something else that emerged very strongly in the opening plenary session and that is that iCommons is a truly global, polyglot community. It is no accident that the conferences happen in places that are off the major beat of the USA and Europe – or even the Asian industrialised powerhouses. it means that iCommons can specialise in the off-beat. It would be a mistake, though, to think that this offbeat quality means that it is lightweight. it is all a matter of how one measures success.
In the opening session, which showcases commons projects – projects that rely on openness and collaborative development of free culture - there was a strong emphasis on the success and reach of the projects being showcased. We were presented with a Finnish film venture, music sites from Luxembourg and the USA and a Japanese collaborative graphic design business. All three were highly professional. All three drew very large audiences. All three were spinning business models from free and collaborative ventures that they were running. Has iCommons grown up? A young adult perhaps, but entering the mainstream rather than just demonstrating cool and cute. Or is it risking morphing into another version of the commercial world?
Take one case - in the showcased projects, the Finns offered us Star Wreck, a full length, collaborative science fiction parody, of highly professional quality combined with a wacky sense of humour. There was an interesting play here of what success means. Is it the fact that the big commercial production houses in the USA got interested (in other words, that the collaborative venture had substantial commercial potential)? Or that this interest was global – the Russians and Japaenese were nibbling? Was it the success of a community development project in generating creative and commercial success for its members? Or was it that they have had 5 million downloads – a huge audience? Or that the movie comes in 40 languages - including Klingon? Most amusingly, that it got the nod from those who really decide what is mainstream – it was pirated in China and India, even though it was available completely free of charge.
These are some of the questions that are resonating around the iCommons now. And what are the impact measures for collaborative free and open projects.
tags: dubrovnik croatia culture openbusiness openculture commons summit07
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