Entries tagged as “free culture”

Beautiful Maps – Open Street Map in Water Colours

You know, really never know what the web is going to throw at you next. The great people over at Stamen Design (if you’ve never heard of Stamen you are really missing out – they are probably the best data visualization company I know) have created a watercolor version of Open Street Maps. Why? Because [...]

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International Open Data Hackathon 2011: Better Tools, More Data, Bigger Fun

Last year, with only a month of notice, a small group passionate people announced we’d like to do an international open data hackathon and invited the world to participate. We were thinking small but fun. Maybe 5 or 6 cities. We got it wrong. In the end people from over 75 cities around the world [...]

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The Geopolitics of the Open Government Partnership: the beginning of Open vs. Closed

Aside from one or two notable exceptions, there hasn’t been a ton of press about the Open Government Partnership (OGP). This is hardly surprising. The press likes to talk about corruption and bad government, people getting together to talk about actually address these things in far less sexy. But even where good coverage exists analysts [...]

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Access to Information is Fatally Broken… You Just Don’t Know it Yet

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about access to information, and am working on a longer analysis, but in the short term I wanted to share two graphs – graphs that outline why Access to Information (Freedom of Information in the United States) is unsustainable and will, eventually, need to be radically rethought. First, [...]

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Lessons from fashion’s free culture: Johanna Blakley on TED.com

This TEDx talk by Johanna Blakley is pure gold (thank you Jonathan Brun for passing it along). It’s a wonderful dissection – all while using the fashion industry as a case study – of how patents and licenses are not only unnecessary for innovation but can actually impede it. What I found particularly fascinating is [...]

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