I recently returned from 10 days in Sweden, speaking at two conferences.
The first conference was the Nordic Cultural Commons Conference organized by open-law wunderkind Herrko Hietanen. I got to reconnect with the always-inspiring Paul Gerhardt and his Archives for Creativity Project and pontificate leisurely with him about what "Britishness" is, while the conference organizers had us drinking champagne several hundred feet underground in Stockholm, in a former top-secret nuclear reactor lab called "R1". Victor Stone of CC Mixter was there, and he and his wife provided the ambient audio/video to the nuclear-reactor party.
I got reconnect with both founder and also the current head of Pirate Bay, since we were on the same panel together. A few hours drinking mojitos with Rickard, the head of the Swedish Pirate Party. At the first night's dinner, the quiet unassuming lawyer sitting opposite me turned out to be Till from the GPL Violations project! Also got to spend time with Timo from Star Wreck, who is working on his new film Iron Sky. I might get involved with Star Wreck 2, helping them fight evil in the movie business.
Stockholm is incredibly gorgeous: 11 islands, bridges & water everywhere, grand buildings. A cuisine that is clean, fresh, light and honest. Ate twice at two of my favorite Stockholm restaurants: Wedholms Fisk and Lisa Elmqvist which is inside one of the great food markets of the world: Ostermalms Saluhall.
This was one of the best conferences I've ever attended, perhaps not surprising as one of the other all-time-best conferences was another one in Finland: OpenMind 2006, where I met Herrko, the Star Wreck boys, Vili Lehdonvirta and Andreea Chelaru. Finland creates wonderful things.
In Stockholm I participated in a panel and gave a talk. The first panel was the much-anticipated "REVOLUTION OR REFORM - debate on pirate movement and copyright reformism. A video record of that panel is available at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3700025533865609299.
I also gave a presentation entitled "Money for Nothing: building on the Commons for fun and profit" about Magnatune and BookMooch. The slides to my talk are downloadable, and the video is also up at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5540725595751786822
Next I went to Gothenburg to the FSCONS conference, which was a joining of the Free Software Movement and the Open Culture Movement. Many interesting talks, but by far the best were those by Smári McCarthy, including a brilliant keynote he did about Crowdsourcing Democracy: : applying the lessons of open source culture to governance.
The video of my presentation: "Squeezing the evil out of the music industry" is available here:
http://giss.tv/dmmdb//player.php?ID=527
and the slides to that presentation may also be downloaded.
All the videos from the FSCONS conference may be viewed here:
http://giss.tv/dmmdb/fscons
Just before the Swedish conferences, I was in Frankfurt attending & speaking at the Frankfurt Book Fair, about BookMooch.
My slides from that presentation are downloadable and a video is available here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1508516227510460766
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