We have now picked the winner of the Amazon gift card, but your opinion is still valuable for us and the questionnaire is open.
Thank you!
We have now picked the winner of the Amazon gift card, but your opinion is still valuable for us and the questionnaire is open.
Thank you!
PhD student, Aalto University
Mikael Järvelin from the Finnish Institute blogs about the latest news on The United States’ war against online piracy.
Last Wednesday, the January 18th, the English Wikipedia and many other significant websites blacked out for 24 hours. The blackout was a protest against The United States house bill, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and senate bill, PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act), which have been put forward to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. The Proposals would ban advertising on the allegedly infringing websites, bar search engines from linking to these sites and order Internet service providers to prohibit access to these sites. The proposal would also criminalize streaming of forbidden content with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Possibly the biggest problem with these proposals is that if carried out in their current form, they would also harm perfectly legal websites. Websites that are designed to able shearing of files or videos would for example be in danger, because they enable sharing of copyrighted material. These websites would be responsible for the files that the users post on their website. The government and some major corporations, such as record companies and movie studios, would have a chance to shut down websites that hold copyrighted material. These shutdowns wouldn’t even require a hearing or a trial.
One of the biggest concerns with these new proposed laws is that they would enable censoring of websites in a large scale. The United States would enable censorship of foreign websites. This would cause a serious threat to the freedom of speech as the United States government and some major corporations could censor foreign web pages. This has even been compared to the Chinese censorship on the Internet. United States would hardly be pleased about this sort of reputation.
What is comforting is that the protests by Wikipedia and the like-minded websites really made a difference. Before the blackout, the majority in the congress had supported the proposal, but afterwards there has been more opposition than support. Some people have called protests unnecessary, because in their view the proposal was unlikely to pass anyway. Even further, some have criticized that it is overreacting to close down global service because of one country’s national politics. Nevertheless, the protest really changed minds, so it is clear that the effort was not futile.
Only two days after the protests, SOPA and PIPA were temporarily shelved. The proposals will be reconsidered, but one thing is sure. We haven’t heard the last of these proposals. They will be back soon. We can only hope, that passing of these laws will not be reality in their current form, since this could cause a serious threat to democracy and to the freedom of speech.
Mikael Järvelin
The Finnish Institute in London
Community Coordinator of Open Knowledge Foundation, Kat Braybrooke blogs about the first open knowledge meetup in Finland.
Last month in Helsinki, four Finns, a Russian and a Canadian huddled anxiously around a desk at Aalto University’s School of Economics with a fleet of glowing laptops, finishing last-minute prep for the first Open Knowledge Finland meetup and hoping a few brave souls would show up. A few hours, 80 participants and many intriguing discussions later, I stopped in the midst of a conversation to reflect upon the inspiring Finns around me – and I realised I had witnessed the start of a movement.
I work as Community Coordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation, an NGO that builds projects, technical tools and communities that promote open knowledge. A specific focus this year for the OKFN is to help enrich *regional* understandings of openness, which we do through building chapters, meetups and conferences that bring locals together in new ways. We have incubating open knowledge communities in over 10 locations, from Brasil to the Czech Republic, and this October’s Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw saw over 400 members of 40 nations come together to build new projects and share ideas. I’m a Canadian from Vancouver, but I grew up in Las Vegas and now live in London, so I’m no stranger to this newly muddled form of international consciousness. And, like many other hybridised young people with roots around the world, I see myself first as a global citizen – and I believe in the potential of integrated digital and physical networks to support newly participatory civil societies.
While I was in Finland (my first trip so far north in my life), I found that the greatest advances in open knowledge and transparency are often introduced by citizens themselves, and that these concepts are especially strong in nations built on egalitarian principles of equal access and opportunity. I finally understood how fitting it is that Helsinki beat out 46 other cities to be named the World Design Capital for 2012 – a move that has spurred a multiplicity of new projects combining design, art, academia and technology with key concepts about openness (as seen in the neighbouring – and brilliant – Alternative Design Capital event). The city is in the midst of a key moment in its contemporary history, and I saw evidence of this everywhere I looked.
A few months ago, the first Finnish FABlab (a small-scale workshop for digital fabrication originated by MIT) opened at the Aalto University Media Factory – and over drinks last month with locals in Helsinki and at the Finnish Institute’s 20th Anniversary dinner, I heard about countless other initiatives that had been started through new collaborations between public and private sectors, from OpenStreetMap Finland to the Centre for Open Source Solutions to Helsinki Hacklab to Sähköautot.
The decision of our talented Helsinki-based organisers to start working with the Open Knowledge Foundation to create a chapter in Finland was based on an observation – while positive legacies were already being built in earnest (as seen by the highly successful Apps4Finland campaign), existing initiatives often did not represent the full diversity inherent within the region’s open data and open knowledge practitioners. The first Open Knowledge Meetup aimed to fill that gap by providing a welcoming space for individuals of all backgrounds and experience levels to meet in-person and collaborate.
After witnessing the results of last month’s Meetup, a night buzzing with positive energy and new ideas (see photos, videos and notes from the event here: http://muistio.tieke.fi/open-knowledge-ehdotukset), I believe these aims were achieved. Participants started off by talking about the current status of open knowledge in Helsinki, and then broke into groups based on specific activities and ideas, with much discussion breaking out amongst listeners about how to best go about those actions, and how to succeed at such goals. Many of us met afterwards and continued to jam on ideas together, debating data and bytes until the early hours of the morning.
The next Open Knowledge Helsinki meetup is on the 28th of this month, and in the meantime participants are sharing ideas through the popular Open Data Ecosystem Facebook group, #avoindata hashtag on Twitter and mailing list. I know I speak for all of my colleagues around the world at the Open Knowledge Foundation when I say that I’m extremely excited to see what happens in the future.
Kat Braybrooke
Community Coordinator of Open Knowledge Foundation