About Prototype Fund Prototype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Individuals and small teams receive a grant to test and develop open source tools and applications in the fields of civic tech, data literacy, data security and others. The Prototype Fund team support the candidates in their application process, keeping things as unbureaucratic as possible and adjusting it to the needs of software developers, hackers and creatives. In short: the Prototype Fund brings iterative software development and government innovation funding together. In the next three years about 40 projects will be funded. In total, the BMBF will grant 1.2 million euros in support of these projects. The video is based upon the design of the Prototype Fund identity and website, developed by the wonderful team at Rainbow Unicorn. I used Inkscape for design, Synfig for animation, and Kdenlive for editing. The video is © Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland licensed under CC-BY, and the music track, ‘Prototype Fund’ was specially composed and recorded by Javier Suarez (Jahzzar) of BetterWithMusic.com, and when used separately is licensed CC-BY-SA Jahzzar. You can find the music track and all project files for download and reuse on Gitlab. In addition to the video, each of the 5 word-pair animations were made into looping GIFs for use on social media, and I set up a graphic and edit template for the team to use for their video interviews which will be cut and published over the course of the 2-year project. I have also been making interview...
On July 2nd I was invited to give a workshop at Supermarkt’s event ARTS & COMMONS: Art, Money and Self Organization in Digital Capitalism. Together with the participants of my workshop, I wanted to discuss the co-creation of artistic work, in the mold of open source collaboration or Yochai Benkler’s term ‘commons-based peer-production‘. The form was a hands-on collaborative collage workshop to get us on-topic, and give participants a taste of peer-production for themselves, followed by a discussion on how peer production of art is currently being attempted, and what might be necessary to improve and spread the process. An in-depth recipe for the collage workshop can be found here, but the general concept was for different teams to work sequentially on the same artworks, with the only method of collaboration and communication between the teams being some written documentation, which would accompany the work-in-progress as it moved from one team to another. We were building on existing work in the commons – Judith Carnaby and I had put together a collection of interesting Public Domain imagery (printable PDFs here), largely gathered from the Public Domain Review, New York Public Library, and the British Library’s Mechanical Curator. As we didn’t have enough time to put together a huge collection, this was bulked up with a few pages ripped out of magazines, where we very naughtily infringed the copyright… er, I mean, where we made a provocative artistic protest, striking at the corrupt heart of the copyright industry’s hegemony. Or something. Next time it will be 100% public domain, I promise :) To understand the process, I’ll take you through...
Op3nCare is a global community working together to make health- and social care accessible for all, open source, privacy-friendly and participatory. I made a number of short icon-based animations to be used in presentations, videos and websites to illustrate their themes. Source files for the animation can be found on...
This post originally appeared on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s ‘Circulate News‘ website. The shift to a circular economy presents a wicked, multidimensional problem: how can we redesign our operating system so that it works in the long term, and reflects the current context in terms of resources, energy and economic pressures? It’s hard to know where to start. After all, our linear economy is reaching its own end-of-life, and ‘designing’ new economies has never really worked that well for us in the past. The challenge is really about enabling an ecosystem to emerge which effectively (re)uses materials and resources, and rebuilds economic, social and natural capital. When we look at the circular economy field now, it’s dominated by large corporate players – and we do need these businesses taking on responsibility and leading with their considerable research, manufacturing and marketing clout. But redwoods and rhinos don’t make a whole ecosystem, there are many more parts to be played. To live up to the rhetoric and develop a real circular economy we need diversity of size, of focus, of motivation, and perspectives. Diversity of scale – key to a healthy economy. Reaching this goal will require a shake-up of not just our products and services, but also the way in which we develop them and interact with each other. Much like the steam engine was able to power the rapid economical, social and – for better or worse – environmental change of the industrial revolution, at this stage it seems we’re waiting to see what invention will propel us headlong into a thriving 21st century circular economy. Will it be...
This article originally appeared in Open It Agency‘s ‘OS is Coming‘ advent calendar series. As Open Source Hardware becomes more widespread, so too do misconceptions about it. One common confusion we see is using ‘open source’ interchangeably with ‘Do-It-Yourself’ – though these are very different concepts. When we advocate for a future where open source is the default for the products and systems around us, we’re not saying that you will get up in the morning, solder together your open source toaster, then go about your day building and taking apart every object you come across. Every open source project gives public access to their designs, blueprints, or sourcecode, meaning that anybody can, in theory, build it themselves. But that doesn’t mean that they necessarily have to. For simple things like open source birdhouses or lemon squeezers, sure, these projects are usually going to be built by the users themselves, maybe from scratch, or maybe from kitsets. But when we look at more complex, technical, or expensive projects, such as an open source video camera or an open source car, most users will in fact not make the product from scratch – it may be very complicated, may require special skills or machinery, or be very expensive to produce in low quantities. Despite this, users can benefit from the open source nature of the project in other ways. The Apertus cinema camera project, for example, is creating a platform – a modular framework – to allow component manufacturers, customization services, and filmmakers themselves to collaborate. Everybody is designing and improving modules for a common format. This means smaller, more...
