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This week I'm focusing on a pragmatic aspect of free culture - international collaborative development, by exploring the volunteer organization IESC-GeekCorps. My guest today is Wayan Vota, director of IESC-GEEKcorps.

GeekCorps was founded in 2000 by Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard law school graduate, and one of the founders of Tripod, one of the early entrants into the web community space., one of the early employees at Tripod.com, and a graduate school dropout from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  read more »

Interview with Richard Poynder

Richard Poynder is a feelance journalist, with contributions in the Financial Times, Information Today, Information World Review, and a regular blogger on his Open and Shut blog.

In 2003 Richard Poynder had the idea to write a book about the open source and free culture movements - focusing on the people behind the movements. The Plan was to devote a chapter to each of the key people in the open and free movements, with a leading introduction, a full interview to get the story from the actors themselves. The book was to be published by O'Reilly media, a publisher that every techie knows. As an O'Reilly editor put it, the publishing deal collapsed due to O'Reilly's "publishing program being hit on multiple fronts, including the continued downturn in the tech sector, outsourcing of jobs, and the decline of independent booksellers". After pulling the plug on publishing the book, O'Reilly proposed an alternative "pay for download" model, whereby the PDF file could be downloaded for a price from the publisher's site.  read more »

Mark Shuttleworth Interview [30 minutes]

On the first episode of this show, I mentioned that KRUU runs on software packaged and distributed for free by a South African entrepreneur. If you stop by KRUU, and use any of our computers - whether it be for surfing the net, ripping a music CD into our library, or editing audio for broadcast, you'll be using a system caled Ubuntu. When the average person thinks about a computer, he or she immediately thinks Windows, or Mac. There are over a hundred alternatives to Windows and Mac, and most of them used to suck - at least for the average desktop user. Now there's a version that does not suck. In fact, if anything it's as good as Windows, and getting to be close to the Mac. In addition, the system comes with tools that make your computing experience immediately productive.  read more »

Guest: Mike Linksvayer, Chief Technology Officer of CreativeCommons.org

Guest: Prayas Abhinav
I started last week with a description of what Open Source is. Mike Linksvayer from creativecommons.org joined in to provide a brief introduction to the Creative Commons license, which is a more flexible alternative to copyright. I'll have Mike for a full hour next week, talking about the details of copyright and creative commons. Check out creativecommons.org for some great information on what open-licensed music is out there, and a very interesting project called ccMixter.

ccMixter is a remixing project. The music that you hear in the background is actually a ccMixter product. ccMixter's tagline is "Download, Sample, Cut-up, Share". This is a great resource for people interested in creating remixes and mashups, without worrying about the legal nightmare of copyright restriction. Go to ccMixter.org  read more »

Guests:
* Mike Linksvayer, CTO, CreativeCommons.org
* Roland Wells
* Jimmy Moore

This is the first episode of Open Views.