December 2008

A standalone version of The Pool's embedded License Chooser is now available to help creators learn different options for sharing work. The full text of the Open Art License is also now available from an easy link off the home page.

July 2008

The Open Art Network and its project The Pool are showcased at Harvard's Berkman Center as an example of how recognition of creative and scholarly research is changing in the 21st century.

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.

24-26 April 2008

Organized by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), this conference features a number of participants from the 2006 and 2007 Connected Knowledge conferences but expands the conversation to include more researchers in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, and the tech industry.

25 March 2008

Craig Dietrich talks at LongGreenHouse about the Mukurtu Archive he helped to design with Kim Christen for the Warumungu people of Australia and the balance it strikes between providing access while preserving cultural norms of privacy and sacred knowledge. The demo of this innovative software serves as a point of departure for a conversation about the connections between indigenous and electronic networks, as well as the role of local determination in an age of global politics.

Other participants include elders from the Penobscot, Mi'kmaq, and Wampanoag communities and New Media faculty and students.

5 August 2007

Is there a middle way between the opposing poles of copyright lockdown" and "information wants to be free"? The organizers of the Connected Knowledge conference series think so, and they invited members of over a dozen indigenous and developed nations to join them at the Banff New Media Institute at the end of July to imagine what this way might look like.

Highlights of the 2007 summit included a review of innovative projects by media producer Jennifer Wemigwans, legal scholar Wendy Seltzer, musicians Randy Kemp and Cristobal Martinez, software designers Mark Daggett and Alex Galloway, community activists Vera Francis and gkisedtanamoogk, and anthropologists James Leach and Kim Christen.

29 January 2007

Still Water has launched a Web site devoted to the Cross-Cultural Partnership framework.

The Cross-Cultural Partnership framework is meant to encourage ethircal collaboration across the many cultural divides that criss-cross our society: between drug companies and rainforest shamans over medicinal herbs; between Native peoples and musicians over ceremonial chants; between artists and technologists in art and science collaborations; and between libertarians and communitarians over control of software design.

The Web site includes the latest framework draft as well as information on the project's goals, contexts, and contributors.

10 January 2007

The first draft of the partnership framework emerged from a four-day intensive discussion among participants in the November 2006 Lucerne conference.

This novel framework allows businesses, organizations, and even individuals to build bridges of ethical behavior across such cultural divides. Although it is meant to be tailored to each circumstance, we hope the partnership framework will encourage creators to define and abide by practices that emphasize kinship rather than competition, participation rather than passivity, genealogy rather than genius.

19 November 2006

Connected Knowledge, the first meeting of the Cross-Cultural Partnership working group took place from November 16-19, 2006 at the Lucerne Inn in Dedham, Maine. Co-organized by gkisedtanamoogk of the Wampanoag Nation, Miigam'agan of the Micmac Nation, and Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito of Still Water, the conference assembled representatives of five nations for an intense period of ceremony, presentation, and discussion.

These include spokespeople for the Wampanoag, Micmac, and Penobscot nations of this continent, a Cambridge University anthropologist who has worked with the Reite people of Papua New Guinea, and representatives of Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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.

In support of separate but related legislation, Jon Ippolito has written an open letter in support of a 2006 Net Neutrality measure. See also Ippolito's previous warnings on the nettime email list regarding Net Neutrality and Internet2 in Feb 2005 and Dec 2005.

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.

28 September 2005

REFRESH!, the first international conference on the histories of art, science, and technology, will feature a presentation by Jon Ippolito entitled "Three Threats to New Media". This presentation makes the case that open recognition systems like The Pool offer a more appropriate way to gauge achievement in new media than traditional academic metrics.

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 an Open Art-style 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, 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 that includes a proposal for a new media writing venue based on The Pool.

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.

20 November 2004

A new flavor of open license is predicted to emerge from discussions at UMaine's Conference on the Intellectual Commons. These "open art" licenses will permit the sharing of source files for digital media as well as executables. The daylong conference features Hal Abelson of MIT/DSpace, Neeru Paharia of Creative Commons, and Peter Suber of Knowledge Networks/SPARC.

5 November 2004

Jerome Knope's spiffy CocoaNetworkGrapher maps relationships among collaborators in the Art Pool. Mac OS10.3+ users can try a pre-release version of this network application.

2 September 2004

Still Water, the same folks who bring you the Open Art Network, are co-sponsoring an upcoming Conference on the Intellectual Commons at the University of Maine this November that will feature the Open Art Network. Other organizers include the UMaine Information Sciences Collaborative, Fogler Library, 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.

2 April 2004

John Klima became the latest artist to join the Open Art Network, contributing a code toolkit for the Gameboy console.

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.