Monthly Archives: July 2009

A new journal coming out of the University of Melbourne‘s School of Culture and Communication has set its sights on disseminating new academic work from around the globe. The journal of media and communication, Platform, is exactly that; a platform for bouncing out new ideas. Not only because it is a journal specifically designed to support and publish Honours, Masters and Doctorate students (getting work published in academic journals is very competitive and hard to get when you’re competing with seasoned academics) but also because the journal is open access. Authors of papers selected for publication are encouraged to license their submission under a Creative Commons licence. The journal itself is, by default, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia licence.

Platform submissions are refereed by a diverse international board of established and emerging scholars from different areas of Media and Communication and it is edited by graduate students at the University of Melbourne.

The inaugural volume, “Mediated Mobilities: Negotiating Identities“, which was launched today, includes six submissions from graduates in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada and covers a spectrum of topics from time, space and place to sexuality, identity and prejudice. ccAustralia is happy to announce that all of the authors opted to release their article under a Creative Commons licence, meaning their research and ideas are available for you to read and remix!

If you’re a PhD or Masters student working on something good in the Media and Communications field, then get your submission in for volume 2 due for release in January next year.

Again, we were pretty excited about this so we posted a case study about it on the CC Case Studies Wiki.
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Photo: Mosman Readers by Mosman Library.

It seems like all we can talk about at ccAustralia is governments at the moment; and I am afraid this entry is not going to break from that theme. But when you read about the exciting news we have to report, you’ll understand why we just had to post about it!

Mosman Municipal Council, the local government authority for the northern shores of Sydney Harbour, has brought together the ‘open and transparent’ government holy triad: open consultation, open content and open data! On 7 April 2009 they adopted a new Community Engagement Strategy with an intention to “inform”, “consult”, “involve” their residence.
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Even though we’ve been positively bombarding you with news about open access to government of late, there have been some more particularly exciting developments that we just had to post about.

Last week the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), Senator Conroy, released Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions, a roadmap for Australia’s digital future. This report looks at the hot topic of the current state of the digital economy in Australia – what’s happening, why it’s important to us, and how we can make it better. It sets out the essential elements of a digital economy, looks at case studies of Australian’s working in this space (including Creative Commons user YouDecide), and discusses the government’s role in creating a successful innovation environment.

The report comes out of a number of public consultation activities DBCDE ran last year, including public forums, a discussive blog and finally a consultation paper, which received over 110 submissions. This level of interactive consultation is ground-breaking for an Australian government policy process, and shows how much DBCDE is seeking to really engage with the government 2.0 possibilities of the internet. But they haven’t just stopped here. The report itself is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works licence.
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David Bollier by Joi Ito

We’re excited to announce that Radio National’s Future Tense program this week will be featuring an interview with commons activist and policy strategist David Bollier.

Those familiar with public discussion surrounding the commons have probably heard of David Bollier. He’s an independent strategist, consultant and journalist who is one of the leading public thinkers on the issue of reclaiming the commons. In January he published a book, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial licence), which chronicles the history of free and open-source software, Creative Commons and the broader “free culture” movement.
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Brisbane-based non-profit Human Ventures Limited is an organisation that exists to help us realise a world in which each of us understand that, first and foremost, we are human. And one way they are doing that is through little visual reminders about our world.

This first of these info transparency or infographic is the ‘Apparently… we’re full‘ poster they released last month. Using the distinctive imagery of beer bottles, Human responds to claims by some members of the Australia community that “We’re full”. When you look at our population to habitable area ratio we are far from at capacity. It turns out, like our national anthem says, “we’ve boundless plains to share”.

Humans naturally share. And so Human are sharing their info transparency with you and me. They’ve released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works licence. They’ve even provided a print-ready, A3 PDF of the poster. Here it is up on the ccAustralia office wall:

Apparently… we’re full poster by Human Ventures Limited (top) and Silent Thoughts by Ali J.

Share it with the world. Put it up on your wall!
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