Tomorrow, Thursday March 7 2013 at 12PM on the Steps of City Hall City Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer will hold a press conference to celebrate the first anniversary of NYC’s Open Data Law. On this day, under the terms of the bill, all qualifying data currently available on any NYC.gov website must be posted to the Open Data portal. Various open government groups including the Open NY Forum and the New York City Transparency Working Group will be in attendance to support Councilwoman Brewer.
What: NYC Open Data rally
Where: NYC City Hall Steps
When: Thursday March 7 2013. 12PM
RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/openny/events/107627092/
On Saturday March 30, 2013, from 9:30am to 4:30pm, the Open Tech NYC 2013 conference will be held at the Hunter’s Point Event Space in Queens. Attendees will learn how open source is driving the NYC tech scene – from locally grown open source projects, to startups and big enterprises that run on open source, to new organizations and collaborative models. The format will be aeries of 45 minute talks. Registration is $11.54 for students, $27.37 for everyone else. Coffee and lunch will be provided. No webcast details at this time.
What: Open Tech NYC 2013
When: Saturday March 30, 2013 9:30am-4:30pm
Where: Hunter’s Point Plaza, Queens NY (LIC)
Agenda: http://www.opentech2013.org/#agenda
Webcast: No info.
Twitter: #opentech | #opentechnyc |
Today, July 4, Independence Day in the USA the New York Times has chosen to speak out on the freedom on the Internet in an editorial entitled Free Speech and the Internet.
Endorsing the recent UN rapporteur’s report, and noting heavy-handed moves like Chinese censorship,  Italy’s defamation case, data retention in Brazil,  three-strikes laws, & the United States’ dubiously legitimate domain seizures, the Times concludes:
The U.N. has proposed sound guidelines to defend free expression: censorship of content online must be transparent and enforced only through the courts. Governments should not rely on private entities like service providers to censor content and should not hold them liable for user content. Counterterrorism should not be an excuse to bar expression, unless it is to prevent imminent threats.
With few exceptions, governments should not adopt Internet registries that require users to reveal their identities. And defamation — so often used as a legal tool to repress political speech — should be decriminalized. Finally, nobody should be banned from the Internet. It is a fundamental tool for enabling free speech.
Open NY Forum will be hosting the third OpenGov Camp on June 5 2011. The event is in conjunction with the 2011 Personal Democracy Forum (PdF).
OpenGov Camp will ask three questions:
• Where is “local†Open Government going?
• How can we deepen the knowledge of what Open Government can be?
• What are the social and technical tools affecting Open Government’s development?
What: OpenGov Camp
When: Sunday June 5 2011 : 10am-6pm
Where: CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, 219 West 40th Street, NYC
Who: Open to public. Cost $16.36
Register: http://opengovnyc.eventbrite.com/
Hashtag: #OpenGovCamp
Site: http://opengovnyc.org
This is a gathering born from the desire to share and learn in an open environment. It is an event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn are welcome and encouraged. When you come, be prepared to share. When you leave, you’ll leave with actionable strategies for building efficient and engaging social campaigns and technical tools.
On Mar 4 2011 Thomas Catan of the Wall Street Journal reported – Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe – that the US Department of Justice is investigating the MPEG-LA patent pool over its efforts to hobble WebM, which competes with its h264 video format.
From the story
At present, no patent royalties are charged for using Google’s VP8 format. But MPEG LA has questioned that status, and last month issued a call for companies to submit patents they believe may be infringed by VP8. “I can tell you: VP8 is not patent-free,” Mr. Horn said. “It’s simply nonsense.”
For some people in the tech industry, the issue is less about cost and more about competition and control over technologies at the heart of the Internet. “How could it come to pass that it’s illegal to compete?” asked Monty Montgomery, who runs a free software foundation, XIPH.org, and supports VP8. “That’s when everybody’s antitrust bells should be going off.”
The threat of future lawsuits has helped persuade some companies to forsake VP8. Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, explained in an email to the Free Software Foundation Europe last year that a patent pool was assembled to “go after” a previous open-source format.
“All video codecs are covered by patents,” Mr. Jobs wrote. “Unfortunately, just because something is open-source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents.”
Barbara Van Schewick’s talk at NYU Law School on Nov 10 2010, based on her book Internet Architecture and Innovation. Van Schewick, after giving a thorough outline of the principles that allowed innovation on the open Internet to flourish, suggests that for its continued generation regulation may be required that puts the reins of any blocking, discrimination, and/or access controls firmly in the hands of the users not the providers.
View on YouTube: http://youtu.be/343t_6yxlSI
Transcribe on AMARA: http://www.amara.org/en/videos/WrtlcDsnluMF/
More information: http://netarchitecture.org/
The Google/Verizon joint policy proposal for an open Internet in August made a point of differentiating between ‘broadband Internet’ and “other additional or differentiated services”. Â On September 1 2010 the FCC followed up by issuing a notice of further inquiry to 2009’s Open Internet NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking), asking for public comment on just how such differentiation should be defined.
A group of 32 Internet veterans, co-ordinated by ISOC-NY member Seth Johnson, have come up with a detailed response that strongly urges the FCC to clearly establish the Internet as an inalienable, open, general purpose platform.
Read it below:
Following up on a one day conference last year TimesOpen 2.0 is a series of events surveying the current landscape on a variety of topics, including Geolocation, Open Government, the Real-Time Web and Big Data. These free geek-oriented sessions are hosted on the 15th floor of the New York Times building with the added attendance inducement  of free beer.
Third and next session is Nov 9 2010 – The Real-Time Web.
The series will be capped off with a hack day in early December.
- TechPresident report on session 2 – Open Government.
As part of our OneWebDay celebration ISOC-NY sponsored and contributed to the Innovate/Activate IP Activism Unconference at New York Law School on Sep 24-25 2010. Â Joly MacFie was on the ‘Replicate / Recreate’ panel on Friday, where he talked about the Internet Society, and also his background in punk rock. (Video) – (Silverlight required).
Then in the Saturday unconference sessions  Joly expanded on the same theme (no video at present) and new ISOC-NY director Glover Wright gave a talk on his efforts this past summer promoting open government data initiatives in India. (video below)
As the capstone event to the second Open Video Conference this weekend there will be a MemeFactory presentation at the Fashion Institute of Technology – a follow-up to last year’s very successful event at NYU (video below). Promised: “iPhone controlled laptops, TCP/IP coordinated Keynotes, live-tweeted attribution, HTML 5 supported streaming simulcast, and MORE FUNNY, EMBARRASSING, AND CONFUSING VIDEOS THAN YOU HAVE EVER SEEN IN ONE PLACE BEFORE IN YOUR LIFE.”
Audio files from the Open Hardware Summit at the New York Hall of Science – Sep 23 2010. (Video is coming)
INTRODUCTION
- Peter Semmelhack, Bug Labs
- Ayah Bdeir, Creative Commons & littleBits
- Alicia Gibb, Bug Labs & NYCResistor
WHY DO OPEN HARDWARE?
- Limor Fried, Adafruit [mp3] [ogg] [slides] [video]
- Gerald Coley, Texas Instruments & Beagle Board [mp3] [ogg] [slides] [video]
- Bruce Perens, founder: OSI [mp3] [ogg] [slides]
- John Wilbanks, Creative Commons [mp3] [ogg] [slides]
INSTITUTION Sprint talks
- Â Â Â Amanda McDonald Crowley, EYEBEAM: ‘Open Art and Tech’ [mp3] [ogg] [slides]
- Â Â Â Jim Barkley & Sam Sayer, MITRE: ‘ARx: Almost-Ready-to-Anything’ [mp3] [ogg] [slides]
-    Andy Lee, NASA: ‘NASA’s Open Lab’ [mp3] [ogg]
OPEN HARDWARE IN REALITY
BUSINESS: Open hardware business models [mp3] [ogg] [slides]
- Â Â Â Moderator: Eric von Hippel, MIT Sloan School of Management
- Â Â Â Chris Anderson, DIYdrones & Wired
- Â Â Â Peter Semmelhack, Bug Labs
- Â Â Â David Carrier, Parallax
- Â Â Â Phil Torrone, Adafruit & Make
- Â Â Â Massimo Banzi, Arduino
- Â Â Â Bunnie Huang, Chumby
PRODUCTIZING: Scaling/ Manufacturing/ Moving beyond DIY [mp3] [ogg]
- Â Â Â Moderator: Dale Dougherty, Make
- Â Â Â Eric Pan, Seeed Studio
- Â Â Â Matt Peddicord, Buglabs
- Â Â Â Clint Cooley, Circuit Co
- Â Â Â Nathan Seidle, Sparkfun
-    Paulo Blikstein, Stanford University & GoGoBoard
- Â Â Â Taylor Hokanson, DIYLILCNC
VENUE
LAW: Open hardware licenses and norms [mp3] [ogg]
- Â Â Moderator: David Mellis, Arduino & MIT Media Lab
- Â Â Â Windell Oskay, Evil Mad Scientist
- Â Â Â Wendy Seltzer, Harvard University: Berkman Center for Internet & Society
- Â Â Â Matt Stack, Liquidware
- Â Â Â Michael Weinberg, Public Knowledge
- Â Â Â Peter Brown, Free Software Foundation
- Â Â Â Xavier Carcelle, OHANDA
DESIGN sprint talks
- Â Â Â Dave Vondle, IDEO: ‘Re-examining Design for Open-Source Hardware’ [mp3] [ogg] [slides]
- Â Â Â Georgina Voss, Tinker: ‘To Build a (Smart) Home’ [mp3] [ogg]
-    Mike Kuniavsky, ThingM: ‘Three crappy Open Hardware situations we’ve had to deal with, and what we did.’ [mp3] [ogg]
EDUCATION sprint talks
- Â Â Â Leah Buechley, MIT Media Lab: ‘OSH in the Academy’ [mp3] [ogg]
- Â Â Â Dan Steingart, City College CUNY: ‘Ardustat:A Case Study in Open Source Hardware for Academics’ [mp3] [ogg] [slides]
- Â Â Â Michael Shiloh, Teach Me to Make: ‘Highly Learnable Open Hardware’ [mp3] [ogg] [slides]
DEFINITION AND DISCUSSION
*Â Â Â Ayah Bdeir, Creative Commons & littleBits: Introduction of definition 1.0 and signing [mp3] [ogg]
The third Open World Forum – being staged in Paris on 30 September and 1 October 2010 .
Year on year, the Free / Open Source model is affirming itself as the invisible driver behind the digital revolution, whether at the level of emerging technologies (Cloud computing, the Internet of Things…), business models and societal trends. The aim of the Open World Forum is to gather together all the key decisionmakers and interested parties – political leaders, CxOs and decision-makers, Community leaders and stakeholders, entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and academic – to evaluate possible trends and cross-fertilize growth initiatives around the open digital world.
This year’s theme, ‘OPEN IS THE FUTURE‘, will be explored through 15 Keynote addresses, 20 conferences and workshops, 8 Think Tanks, 1 Demo Cup, 1 Open IT ShowRoom and a TV Channel, organized into 3 main strands and 9 themes, plus associated events:
- Press release | News Desk
- Program | Agenda
- Twitter: @OpenWorldForum | #OpenWorldForum
The Open Hardware Summit will be a venue to present, promote and discuss the undergoing open source hardware movement. The summit will focus on hardware as a system, involving conversations on software, manufacturing, legal, and other factors surrounding open source hardware. It is taking place on September 23rd, at the New York Hall of Science – right before Maker Faire.
The Open Hardware movement is engaged in nailing down the definition, currently OSHW v.0.3, of the term open source hardware and producing a real, and enforceable license, much like the Creative Commons License does for artistic creations and the GPL does for software.
August 7, 2010 – 12:00pm – 5:00pm
OpenPlans
148 Lafayette Street
Penthouse (13th floor)
New York, NY, 10013
https://www.drumbeat.org/events/drumbeat-new-york
More info below:
WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.
WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.
Benefits of WebM
*Openness and innovation. A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP are open for anyone to implement and improve. With video being core to the web experience, a high-quality, open video format choice is needed. WebM is 100% free, and open-sourced under a BSD-style license.
*Optimized for the web. Serving video on the web is different from traditional broadcast and offline mediums. Existing video formats were designed to serve the needs of these mediums and do it very well. WebM is focused on addressing the unique needs of serving video on the web.
o Low computational footprint to enable playback on any device, including low-power netbooks, handhelds, tablets, etc.
o Simple container format
o Highest quality real-time video delivery
o Click and encode. Minimal codec profiles, sub-options; when possible, let the encoder make the tough choices.
For more information about WebM, see http://www.webmproject.org/
Steve Jobs, responding to a free software advocate suggesting Apple consider implementing “free” video codec Theora:
All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.
The Institute for Information Law & Policy and the International
Intellectual Property Society present: Open Source Database Licensing
Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Time: 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Location: NY Law School 185 West Broadway NYC Room W201
RSVP: Naomi Allen at naomi.allen*at*nyls.edu. Refreshments will be served.
Database owners are increasingly seeking ways to make their data
available so that others can contribute to and build on their work. This
“open data” movement emphasizes the importance of sharing data for both
scientific development and humanitarian response. The willingness of
database owners to make their data available for re-use depends on their
ability to impose conditions on that release, which requires
consideration of the varying levels of copyright protection afforded to
databases across jurisdictions.
Please join us for a panel presentation focusing on the challenges
associated with balancing the advantages of “open data” with the need
for database owners to impose conditions on release. The speakers will
address the current state of copyright protection afforded to databases
and strategies for encouraging database sharing.
Panelists:
Janelle C. Bonanno, Graduate Research Fellow, New York Law School
Christopher Cotter 3L, New York Law School
Rachel DeLetto, Graduate Research Fellow, New York Law School
Cynthia Grady 2L, New York Law School
Chris Holmes, The Open Planning Project; Chair, Project Steering Committee, GeoServer
Molly Beutz Land, Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School
James Vasile, Software Freedom Law Center; Board Member, Open Source Matters
NewTeeVee reports Google will soon make its VP8 video codec open source. The company is scheduled to officially announce the release at its Google I/O developers conference next month, a source with knowledge of the announcement said
At our ISOC-NY “Freedom in The Cloud” event in February Eben Moglen challenged the tech community to come up with a free, open, and decentralized social networking platform. The folks at OneSocialWeb are working on breeding just such an animal..
Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President at Google, wrote a very interesting email about the value of openness on the web and sent the email to Google’s employees. He recommends Googlers to use open standards, to open source software, to make it easy to export data from Google’s services and to fight for an open Internet.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html
The Open NY Summit will be the first of many events produced by open government practitioners and volunteers. The goal of this first event is to bring new ideas and voices into the conversation, and to inspire new initiatives and innovations.