Information Access - Articles Archive
from October 28, 2006 to July 29, 2006

A few days ago I had the honour of hosting in my Rome apartment, freedom activist and hacker Richard Stallman, a near-like mythological figure in the world of computing, hacking and a pioneer figure in supporting free software as a political weapon. Wikipedia, which devotes ten pages ... read more

As people reject the spin-heavy, information-lite mass media and turn to networked, participatory media emerging through blogs, podcasting and video sharing services like YouTube, truth becomes no longer the property of the few. It is being negotiated by active, engaged participants in the new media landscape ... read more

''There is a secret "underlife" poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control." Naomi Wolf - The Beauty Myth "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted. Every girl deserves to ... read more

Participatory media has exploded in recent times, and moves from strength to strength almost daily, with new services arriving and evolving that make communicating easier than ever. But who owns the work you share? We are living through a huge shift away from top-down, one-way mass ... read more

Software Patents Stifle Innovation And Kill Competition In Favour Of A Few. A software patent effectively stifles innovation and ensures that an elite few reap the rewards, while everyone else is left out in the cold. While Copyright, Copyleft and Creative Commons licenses protect authors work in ... read more

Robin Good remix of the P2P file-sharing open-source movie Steal This Film from Sweden's Pirate Bay. Steal This Film (Part One) is a freely available open-source movie about file sharing, Bit Torrent and the news story of the Swedish very popular Pirate Bay torrent tracker. In the ... read more

by Stephen Downes Guy Kawasaki last week wrote an item describing "ten things you should learn this school year" in which readers were advised to learn how to write five sentence emails, create PowerPoint slides, and survive boring meetings. It was, to my view, advice on how ... read more

The Table of Free Voices is an ambitious experiment in bringing over a hundred of the most important thinkers, scientists and humanitarians in the world together, and creating a dialogue between them and a global public. Dropping Knowledge, the non-profit organization behind the Table of Free Voices ... read more

by Rudo de Ruijter Our politicians have shaped the idea many people have of our world. They have divided our world into good and bad. Of course, they are the good guys and the ones they accuse are the bad guys. Simple, isn't it? However, if we ... read more

Open-source, as an approach to create software as a commodity, new ways of doing journalism, news reporting and even video production may seem a little too cutting edge to many, but indeed these new experimental ways of working collaboratively and from the roots, show great promise ... read more

Evolution is about change. Anyone doing social change work, anyone trying to improve conditions, anyone trying to empower, succeed, innovate, heal, strengthen, renew, transform, enlighten -- or even conquer or destroy -- is engaged in evolutionary work. Ultimately change is happening all the time -- ... read more

Journalism without the media? How can that be? Can grassroots, community-based, networked journalism be transformed into a powerful new media format? NewAssignment.net, in the words of its own creator is "a way to fund high-quality, original reporting, in any medium, through donations to a non-profit..." Here three of its ... read more

"Pay attention. Practice compassion. ;-) " Recently, science and technology blogger Roland Piquepaille interviewed Howard Rheingold, and asked him a number of questions about the future. Howard, is the author of SmartMobs, a best -selling book about the emerging power of small and large groups of individuals ... read more

On July 27, 2000, online video news reporter and California-based Marc Strassman, interviewed Pulitzer-winning author Ross Gelbspan about his recently-published book on global warming, The Heat is On. As the San Fernando Valley, where Solar World, the forward-looking alternative energy digital news magazine published by Marc ... read more

Seven years ago in Bangkok, during my participation at an international workshop on improving training quality, organized by the World Bank Institute, I hand-wrote the following: "We are light-years away from what I would call effective training or education." I had just been out of a series of ... read more