If you’re in or around Brighton this weekend, be sure to come and have a drink with ORG. We’re really keen to meet ORG supporters in the area and find out about local digital rights concerns. It’s not often we get to leave the big smoke on official ORG business (we’re roadshowing our e-voting campaign [...]

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So I’ve just returned from Lugradio Live 2007, where there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for the work ORG has been doing over the last year. Thanks to Glyn and Richard for their dedication in manning the ORG stall. Together we met a lot of ORG supporters, and found a few more!
There was [...]

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Yesterday, Sir Alistair Graham, chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, called for the 2007 electoral pilots in the UK to be halted, in a speech to the Association of Electoral Administrators conference. Sir Alistair’s committee has recently published a report on the Electoral Commission calling for major reform of both the commission [...]

Read the rest of "Committee on Standards of Public Life call for halt of May e-voting pilots"

Thanks to everyone who made it along on Monday night. For those who could not attend, and also for reference purposes, you can now download the audio recording - in either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format - from the link below. Its split into 2 sections, 1 covers the lecture from Jonathan Zittrain, and the [...]

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Note: This was the last session on Friday, and again these notes are pretty much verbatim.
How could we operate if there wasn’t copyright? What’s the bare minimum we might exist with?
Ideas for topics for discussion in this session
- What is the business model for artists when you don’t have copyright? How would artists make money? [...]

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Note: Again, these notes are verbatim and so things get a bit chaotic with so many people wanting to make different points, and revisiting issues brought up earlier in the conversation.
We can no longer compete as northern companies on labour costs and materials, so IP is seen as a centre of innovation. Across the board [...]

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Last week I went to a series of sessions run by Birkbeck, the AHRC New Directions in Copyright Network, and the Public Programmes Department of the Tate Modern, entitled Roundtable Discussions on the Future of Copyright and the Regulation of Creative Practice. Here are my notes.
The aim for these sessions is to have a [...]

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William Dutton, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Social dynamics of the internet
This conference is focused on the future, and we wanted it to be evidence based, so thought to identify some patterns and themes in internet use, which are shaping the future of this emerging cyber-infrastructure.
Who uses the internet? How to people use it? [...]

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In UK:
26 million people online
20 billion minutes a month
>20% media consumption time
But big disparity in behaviour: for one part of the day it’s the major source of news and entertainment. In some households, the internet is the dominant entertainment medium in the evening too.
Total advertising market growth is 2.5%, but internet advertising growth is 65%.
Ad [...]

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Synopses of the discussions held earlier.
Derek Wyatt MP, Considering the issue of internet governance
Most of the world governing bodies came out of WWII. Are they appropriate for a 21st C globalised world? If we discuss how we look at he net, is where it is right now currently appropriate. Is WSIS the right place? Or [...]

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