30 May 2008

The Chronicle of Higher Education says The Pool, a social network developed as part of the Open Art Network, "could provide a new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs. Eventually it could play a role in their tenure and promotion as well." The Chronicle also profiled ThoughtMesh, a tag-based system for discovering and publishing online scholarship.

April 2008

The Pool, an online environment for stimulating collaboration, has just launched a Code Pool along with its long-standing Art Pool, which already tracks about 600 projects. Both Pools now feature an embedded license-picker that helps Pool users pick the best terms to share their contributions. The default license is the Open Art license.

10 August 2007

At the end of July Still Water partnered with the Banff New Media Institute to organized the 2007 Connected Knowledge summit. Artistic, legal, and indigenous activists from Australia to Nunavut gathered to explore new paradigms for the responsible sharing of culture.

These included indigenous-themed game designs, archives for sacred information, and new implementations of the Cross-Cultural Partnership developed at Connected Knowledge 2006.

10 April 2007

The Commons of Geographic Data, a project of the University of Maine's Spatial Information Science and Engineering department funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, is a novel prototype for searching for and contributing data referenced to locations on the earth.

Among the more innovative proposals of this group is the investigation of steganographic watermarking of geographic datasets for the purpose not of copyright enforcement but of establishing provenance.

29 January 2007

How can the free access to information required for a democratic society be reconciled with the privacy rights of electronic citizens? Still Water's Cross-Cultural Partnership brings together people from different networks, both indigenous and electronic, for the purpose of envisioning a legal and cultural framework for sharing connected knowledge in a way that is responsible and sustainable.

Meant to be tailored to each circumstance, this framework developed at the 2006 Connected Knowledge summit encourages partners to define and abide by practices that emphasize kinship rather than competition, participation rather than passivity, genealogy rather than genius.

25 July 2006

Members of the Maine Intellectual Commons have written open letters in support of the 2006 Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). Harlan Onsrud writes that "this bill could finally help us...achieve a level playing field in competing for and accomplishing research," while Peter Suber calls FRPAA a "giant step forward" for Open Access. More at the Maine Intellectual Commons Education Wiki.

10 April 2006

"A reflecting and/or refracting Pool: When a local community becomes autonomous online", an essay by Margaretha Haughwout in the April 2006 issue of the online journal First Monday, looks for patterns of resistance and cooperation in the online site The Pool.

Haughwout found a correlation between efforts to ignore or sabotage an open network and vocational or business-oriented attitudes toward college. On the other hand, Haughwout also found evidence that students who used The Pool for a significant amount of time gradually loosened their controls over a given work as it progressed. For example, students were less likely to prohibit others from transforming or recombining a completed Web site than a mere screen mockup. This finding suggests that experience with open networks makes their users more likely to share.

18 October 2005

Interarchive aims to change the paradigm of online scholarship by distributing the way research is published and cited across the entire Web. Although its initial focus is the media arts, Interarchive proposes an emergent approach to acquiring and recognizing influence that might be applied to any networked environment, whether the instruments of influence are academic papers or digital art.

Interarchive currently consists of two working groups:

Interarchive general

This group focuses on a model for distributed publication, including the XML structure required for this paradigm.

Recognition Metrics

This group focuses on devising innovative methods to visualize and assess the search returns resulting from the distributed publication paradigm.

This exciting development should broaden the audience for open networks beyond artists and activists to include academics working in net-native research.

6 May 2005

Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito discussed the collision between open forms of research and traditional academic publishing at the Share, Share Widely CUNY conference on new media education organized by Trebor Scholz. A call for participation in a Text Pool under development--which would offer a fluid, collaborative, and executable alternative to print journals--generated interest among several conference participants.

16 April 2005

In a move that suggests popular interest in a digital media source license, Trent Reznor has released the new single from his upcoming Nine Inch Nails album as a GarageBand file for fan remixes. While the license he offers is more restrictive than the Open Art license under development by the Maine Intellectual Commons, it's a great start.

23 March 2005

Trebor Scholz has posted an interview and audio blog with Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito about changing tenure criteria to create a more open academic standard. The interview touches upon UMaine's online initiatives and Harlan Onsrud's suggestions for raising the profile of open access publications on tenure applications.

25 February 2005

Jon Ippolito presented a number of Maine Intellectual Commons initiatives at Columbia University's fall 2004 lecture series on "Open Source Culture." The other speakers in this semester-long series were author Siva Vaidhyanathan, intellectual property lawyer Jeffrey Cunard, and artists Joy Garnett and Cory Arcangel. You can view detailed Webcasts of all the presentations at the Web site for Columbia's Digital Media Center.

16 December 2004

The Maine Intellectual Commons took a step closer to achieving a practical commons for the University of Maine System when its members met to prioritize actions discussed during November's Conference on the Intellectual Commons. Participants established a half dozen working groups on everything from tenure guidelines to institution repositories. Read more about these under the Work in Progress link at left.

20 November 2004

Some of the brightest minds in the commons movement arrived at UMaine for the daylong Conference on the Intellectual Commons, which included Hal Abelson of MIT/DSpace, Neeru Paharia of Creative Commons, and Peter Suber of Public Knowledge/SPARC. All presentations will be archived on the conference Web site by early 2005.

2 September 2004

An upcoming Conference on the Intellectual Commons at the University of Maine this November will feature Creative Commons, DSpace, the Open Art Network, and many other innovations in intellectual property and open access. Organizers include the UMaine Information Sciences Collaborative, Fogler Library, Still Water, and the Technology Law Center at the University of Southern Maine. The conference is the first public sign of an ongoing effort to make UMaine a leadership campus in open access. Registration is required but admission is free.

18 December 2003

Over 40 bloggers wrote entries on The Pool following its prominent citation in Wired. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Wendy Seltzer wrote that The Pool "encourages its contributors to leave the exclusivity of copyright behind, by showing them the value to be gained by sharing." According to Random Mumblings, the project "demonstrates how collaboration and, at minimal, restoration of fair use can improve a community, and presents a potentially bright future for a new creative commons in the public domain." Larry Borsato summed up the project with, "What did you learn in school today? Sharing."

16 December 2003

Michelle Delio calls The Pool "a daring leap" in the headline news story at Wired magazine's online site:

"To prove that open sourcing any and all information can help students swim instead of sink, the University of Maine's Still Water new media lab has produced the Pool, a collaborative online environment for creating and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts....'It's all about imagining a society where sharing is productive rather than destructive, where cooperation becomes more powerful than competition,' [Professor Joline] Blais said."

22 November 2003

Jon Ippolito presented the Open Art Network at A Conversation with Lawrence Lessig, Eyebeam Atelier, New York. The Open Art Network and its related project, The Pool, were also featured projects in the Still Water-Eyebeam critical forum Distributed Creativity.

12 October 2003

Art students at the University of California at Berkeley are building and contributing projects to The Pool, thanks to the efforts of UC Berkeley professor, curator, and media artist Richard Rinehart.

15 May 2003

A project of the University of Maine's Still Water program, The Pool is a collaborative online environment for creating art, code, and texts. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of documentation systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. The Pool's structure is designed to make it easy to track the "wake" left by a contributor's idea, as it gets picked up by new artists or rendered in new mediums, or is accessed by different users with different technologies over subsequent years.

A beta version of The Pool launched at the "New York Digital Salon" Internet 2 teleconference organized by the MARCEL network.