Another awesome project from the Rhodes New Media Lab, check out the ‘State of the Arts‘ this week at the second largest festival of its kind in the world: the South African National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Vincent Maher and the ‘99% Live’ crew are redefining South African interactive journalism as they produce news, reviews […]

The prize: R6,000 cash!
To enter the competition, produce either one of the following:
• a digital video (max. 60 seconds); OR
• a digital artwork; OR
• a digital info-graphic
that, in your view, expresses the essence of African Digital Creativity, Remixing and Innovation.
Interactive work that requires an internet connection is encouraged.
Deadline: 31 July, 2005
Email submissions to: HFordSA@gmail.com
All submissions […]

Where: Rosebank Hotel, Johannesburg
When: Wednesday, 25 May @ 5.30pm
Who: Speakers include Prof. Lawrence Lessig, cc Chairman; Neeru Paharia, cc Director; Prof. Coenraad Visser, head of Unisa Mercantile Law; Andrew Rens, Legal Lead, ccSA; Heather Ford, ccSA Director and the SA Dept of Arts and Culture.
Playing: 340ml
RSVP: Silvia Hirano

Nokuthula Mazibuko started writing professionally for South African TV, radio, and print seven years ago. She’s written for Soulcity and Molo Fish II, and more recently appeared as a writer on Litnet (the young voices online writers’ conference).
Thulacreative.co.za is my first bold professional step into the net!” she says.
And bold it certainly is. […]

Nathaniel Stern, Christo Doherty and WSOA Digital Arts worked together to launch Art & Technology, johannesburg (AT.joburg)
in November, 2004. Its intentions are to “promote, explore, discuss and exhibit art and (artists working with) technology in South Africa and the world”.
AT.joburg is a completely “open” resource - the software that it runs on (Wordpress) […]

Laugh It Off’s ‘culture-jamming’ ideals reached full circle last week when they released their latest annual under a licence that permits the same kind of copying and re-mixing that has made the small company famous.
The Creative Commons copyright licence allows people to copy, distribute, display, perform and re-mix the annual for non-commercial purposes. Creative Commons […]

OpenCafe is a non-profit Internet café in Potchefstroom. The goal of OpenCafe is to develop an holistic approach to open source. Not only do OpenCafé staff develop and support open source software applications to sustain their venture, they also train teachers, students, artists in the community to use freely available, high quality content like Wikipedia […]

The Highway Africa News Agency (HANA) decided to use the Creative Commons attribution no derivatives 2.0 licence to distribute their stories from their latest project in Accra. This enables other news organisations to distribute verbatim copies of the newspaper - even for commercial use. The paper, ‘WSIS Africa Agenda’ was distributed at the Accra meeting […]

The local Jo’bloggers became some of the first authors in South Africa to dedicate their work to the public domain using the Creative Commons public domain licence. Why they did it?
‘Sometimes it’s not enough to leave things to assumption, especially if you want to make a statement. We want people to know where we stand, […]

Our cc-er of the week is Roy Blumenthal - ‘artist, filmmaker, radio personality, performance poet, trouble-shooter, and ex-advertising copywriter’. Roy lives in Johannesburg and has a wonderful blog called ‘Coffeeshop Shmuck’ consisting of ‘totally subjective coffee-shop and restaurant reviews’ - a little more unusual (you’ll find great gossip on Roy’s latest hot dates) than what […]

I’ve just returned to Windhoek from an incredible trip to Walvis Bay with Schoolnet Namibia. Executive Director, Joris Komen and three technicians, Helena, Pelinawa and Alexis were demonstrating the model that has won them awards around the world - especially for the great free and open source software policies that they have spearheaded in Namibia.
I […]

The pic to the left is of master SA blogger, Bradley Whittington, from the online gallery of his favorite pics.
You’ll see that I mixed them up a bit to do this collage, and could do so because Brad uses the Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.0‘ license for his site.
Brad told me that he uses the cc […]

Thomas Goetz, Wired Magazine Articles Editor, spoke to Creative Commons South Africa about the Creative Commons licensed CD that they’re launching in November.
Why did Wired decide to support this initiative?
Creative Commons licenses could be part of what the music industry needs to shake out of this stalemate between extreme restrictions and all out anarchy. Wired […]

Magnatune.com, an online record label that makes music available free for non-commercial use under Creative Commons licenses, and pretty cheaply for commercial use, has 3 South African artists on its site.
Mr Gelatine (aka Jean-Pierre Gouws) lives and works in Cape Town and serves up diverse styles of delicious electronica in his Electroluv album.
Indidginus, […]

I bumped into Professor Christo Doherty at an exhibition called ‘Terminal Extentions’ by the Wits Masters-level Interactive Media Design students last week. Christo runs this exciting, young programme at the Wits School of Arts which aims to ‘develop an analytical understanding of either interactive media or 3D animation as aesthetic and commercial forms of communication’. […]

KEWL (Knowledge Environment for Web-based Learning) is an open source e-learning platform that is being re-developed to run on a free software platform rather than on Microsoft servers. According to project director, Derek Keats, ‘KEWL Next Generation will be developed into the most advanced learning management system in the world, using largely talent that exists […]

Bridges.org is an organisation based in Cape Town that has made a number of their research reports on the use of technology in developing countries available under Creative Commons licenses.

These reports include a template for case studies on ICT-enabled development; an explanation of ‘real access‘ to ICTs that extend beyond just computers and connections; and […]