Monthly Archives: October 2009

zombie hands by zenobia_joy

A quick update to the post below about ABC News contributing the the global commons of reusable content and to the pile of decaying corpses at ABC Pool‘s The Dead Walk! group.

ABC has officially released its first professional news footage shot for the project. All three segments released by the ABC are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported licence. You can get them from the ABC News profile on Pool.

The sad news coming out of the project, however, is that Australian horror author Robert Hood has been eaten by a pack of zombies while recording the trailer BrokenSea Audio Production’s upcoming audio drama Zombie Cheerleaders 2: Pom-Poms of Death. See Gary Kemble’s news post for the full story.

Although everyone loves archives footage, it is fantastic to see the ABC compliment their recent releases in that area with contemporary broadcast footage.
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How about a ride lady? by Giulio Saggin

In an Australian first, the ABC is releasing raw news footage under CC – and its of zombies!

As a joint project with the ABC’s collaborative webspace, Pool, ABC News Online is uploading the audio, video and photos from its coverage of the Brisbane Zombie Walk under a CC licence for people to mash up, remix and generally have fun with. [NB - for the time being only logged in users can see licensing information for material on Pool. It's a bug that Pool are fixing]

And to get people going, Pool has launched a dedicated The Dead Walk group and have made a call out for people to upload their own material and combine it with the news footage to tell their story of how they survived the zombie apocalypse. The best material will be featured on ABC News Online.

While this is all a bit of undead fun, it’s also a pretty impressive milestone in the ABC’s ongoing efforts to embrace the Gov2.0 movement give it resources back to the people who fund it – you!
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From the CC International blog:

We are reshaping history as we speak. Millions of CC supporters across the globe – creators, consumers, and advocates – have shown that they believe in the importance of universal access to information online. If we want future generations to enjoy the kind of rich culture that we all deserve, we must invest today in the future of creativity and knowledge.

We hate asking for money, but even non-profits don’t run for free (as in beer). As with last year, CC has set a goal of US$500,000 by 31 December. So if you’ve got a few dollars lying round and you support free culture, consider donating to CC. Or buying a t-shirt.

And if you don’t have a few dollars but you still want to help out, spread the word (we’ve got cool tools to help you do it). Or just use CC or raise awareness of open copyright and you’ll be doing your bit.
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A&P, COFFEE, SANTA CLAUS
from George Eastman House, No know restrictions

For those who haven’t heard, Flickr Commons, one of the most exciting free culture projects to emerge over the last year, is running its first international meetup this weekend.

Flickr Commons has seen collecting institutions from the Smithsonian to Te Puna, the National Library of New Zealand release their public domain images online for free reuse by anyone in the world, under the ‘no known rights’ label.

Now a couple of years in, it’s holding its first community-curated global meet up – a chance for participating agencies from around the world to showcase and celebrate the freedom of their images. They will do this by projecting user-voted images onto the sides of their building throughout the weekend, in conjunction with community events, curators talks, slidesows and conversation.

The participating institutions in Australia include the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane. The Brisbane show is launching from 5:30 tonight, with the other two states holding their main events tomorrow. and it’s all free (as in beer and speech).

We’ll be in Brisbane, so see you all for a celebration of free culture and a love of photography for all.
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The Government 2.0 Taskforce that we’ve posted about a few times over the last few months has made what is possibly its most exciting announcement so far – it’s giving $10,000 to whoever can come up with the most innovative mashup of Australian government data.

The MashupAustralia contest is asking people to show what creativity and programming nouse can do with open public sector information. And to help people get started 59 datasets from more than 15 different government bodies have been released on data.australia.gov.au under CC licences (usually Attribution). All this material, which spans from the Federal electoral boundaries to Powerhouse Museum’s collection database to the locations of Canberra’s public toilets, is now free to be reused, reimagined and repurposed by anyone.
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