Archive for ‘Events’:
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10/13/2008
Wikis Take Manhattan
Last Saturday, TOPP played host to Wikis Take Manhattan, a city-wide scavenger hunt and free media contest.
The idea:One part streets -- more than thirty teams of scavengers spent Saturday afternoon taking pictures of curb cuts and separated bike lanes, all the while admiring the beauty of the city by foot, bike, and train.
One part copyleft -- all photos are Creative Commons-licensed, so they can be freely shared and remixed.This event generated gigabytes of freely-licensed content for StreetsWiki and Wikipedia.
And many, many parts fun -- everyone came back to to the TOPP office for pizza, beer, and mayhem. OK, well the mayhem was had mostly by the uploaders, who spent much of the evening frantically trying to upload and score thousands of pictures from dozens cameras.
The results? Well, the final tally isn't in yet (we're still uploading!), but we had dozens of participants, thousands of photos, and smiles all around. But don't trust us, check out the great Streetfilm.Stay tuned for links to the final photo galleries.
The event was organized by TOPP, Free Culture @ Columbia, Free Culture @ NYU, the NYC Wikimedia meetup, and Creative Commons. Further sponsorship was provided by Pure Food & Wine, The Camera Club of New York, Brooklyn Brewery, Bicycle Habitat, B's Bikes, Birdbath Bakery, The LimeWire Store, and O'Reilly Media.
Thanks to all who helped make this event possible! A special thanks to Emile from the Camera Club of NY for judging Best Photo.
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10/7/2008
Open as in Media
Belated post on last week'sCreative Commons Salon NYC.
Behold, the power of open media.This month's salon, hosted again here at the TOPP office, was fantastic. Free-as-in-speech is often best served with a side of free-as-in-beer. This salon featured Dean Jansen for the Miro Project, Rachel Sterne for GroundReport.com, and the Meerkat Arts Media Collective.
Miro - formerly Democracy - is the free, open source media player that has been making (air)waves of late. Miro could change the way we access the media, decentralizing the distribution of video and audio. Miro's support of open standards has caught the eye of places like TED and German Public Broadcasting. Hey, maybe you'll see a TOPP channel some day soon.
GroundReport is bootstrapping citizen journalism. The problem? When mainstream media fail to cover critical issues - such as the genocide in Darfur - citizens have a hard time pressuring leaders to take action. GroundReport is an alternative to the mainstream media, with a wiki-driven, CC-licensed platform for use by correspondants around the world. GroundReport incentivizes reporters, paying each a proportion of the ad revenue through their stories.
The presentations wrapped up with two short films from the Meerkat Arts Media Collective.The event was organized by Fred Benenson of Creative Commons.
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8/13/2008
Thousands enjoy ‘Summer Streets’
In just two days, more than 10,000 people have watched Streetfilms' great Summer Streets video!
New York took an historic step this Saturday, opening up 7 miles of streets to pedestrians, cyclists, and a host of community uses. The car-free boulevard stretched from Central Park all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge.Streetfilms was there to capture the fun. Sounds like the video is a hit with the Livable Streets community:
- "We came into Manhattan via the F Train at Lex / 63rd and walked over to Park Ave. For the first time ever I was not worried about my kids running onto Park Avenue." - Eric
- "I signed up to volunteer at a summer streets event not really know what summer street was. It was the best time! i can't wait to experience the next 2 Saturdays. You will find me running, learning to bike and just dancing in the streets! Between the traffic and bike rental costs, I've never been motivated to learn but can't pass up free open road!" - Betty
- "The best news is that any and all cities can copy and follow NYC’s
example, regardless of size and location. Portland did Sunday Parkways
on June 22, in October Chicago, April 2009 Baltimore...Clarence's
videos will help others get moving. It’s not rocket science...just do
it!" - Gil Peñalosa (former Bogotá Commissioner of Parks, Sport, and Recreation).
This weekend's event was an amazing success, and we're looking forward to two more days of Summer Streets: this Saturday 8/16 and next Saturday 8/23.
Summer Streets is NYC's version of Ciclovia, a celebrated institution in Bogotá, Colombia. Every Sunday and holiday, Bogotá opens dozens of miles to roads to pedestrians, cyclists, runners, dancers, musicians, and everyone else. The event provides the physical space that makes for healthy, safe communities.
The Summer Streets video adds to Streetfilms' cache of fun and inspiring vignettes that can be used for Livable Streets advocacy around the world. Streetfilms like Ciclovia: Bogotá, Colombia have already helped inspire cities like Baltimore build critical support that opens their streets to the public.
For more great snapshots, check out Streetsblog's Summer Streets Photo Tour.
Photo courtesy of doddnyc/Flickr.
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Last night, we had the pleasure of hosting a Creative Commons Salon here at the TOPP office.
CC Salons are bi-monthly events that bring together fans of free culture and open source. The format is 3 short presentations, followed by beer (sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery) and pizza -- a can't miss combination. Last night's presenters were the folks from Wikia Search, the hilarious comedian Max Silvestri (of Gabe + Max’s Internet Thing), and the Livable Streets crew from TOPP.
If you haven't tried it yet, Wikia Search is a new community-driven search engine that adds the "human touch" back into search. Wikia was founded in 2004 by Jimbo Wales, the creator of Wikipedia (who was in attendance last night -- what a thrill!). Not only do they intend to improve the quality of search results through the power of their users, the entire project is open source, including the indexes of the internet that they constantly crawl. I must say, it's a pretty cool idea, and I've already set it as my default Firefox search helper.Max Silvestri is a piece of work -- a comedian who, according to his website is "great at a bunch of stuff, but especially eating," he gave a gripping monologue about the social pitfalls of Facebook and confessed that he stays up late remixing other people's videos.
Lastly, we gave a short talk about the Livable Streets Network and how we've used Creative Commons licensing for our content, specifically for Streetfilms. By empowering viewers everywhere to freely copy and share videos like Ciclovia, permissive licensing makes it easier to convince your local officials to support Livable Streets projects.
We've been using Creative Commons licenses all along, but we haven't really established a coherent strategy for licensing all our various types of content. Lucky for us, Fred Benenson from CC (who organized last night's event) came back today and helped us think through our options. Thanks Fred! Keep an eye out for more CC badges popping up across the TOPPosphere.
Update: Fred from CC blogged the event on the CC blog, and posted a photoset from the event.
