<nettime-ann> Collaborative Futures - a book written collaboratively using new FLOSS platform

["Cara Bell-Jones" <cara@flossmanuals.net>]

.
////PRESS RELEASE////
From FLOSS Manuals
www.flossmanuals.net
/////////////////////

Collaborative Futures
A book about collaboration, a collaborative book.

"As new technologies come into play, people become less and less
convinced of the importance of self expression. Teamwork succeeds
private effort. "
Marshall McLuhan

Despite these words, the true nature of collaborative culture as a form
of creative expression in the context of digital and network
technologies has remained elusive, a buzzword often falling prey to
corporate and ideological interests. This book on Collaborative Futures
was collaboratively written by five core authors working from a set of
assumptions, many of them shared, some of them divergent, as an
experimental five-day Book Sprint in January 2010. Developed under the
aegis of transmediale.10, and executed by FLOSS Manuals this third
publication in the festival's 'parcours' series resulted in the
initiation of a new vocabulary on the forms, media and goals of
collaborative practice.

This book was created by Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michael Mandiberg, Mike
Linksvayer, Marta Peirano, Alan Toner, Aleksandar Erkalovic (programmer)
and Adam Hyde (facilitator). Bios following. It was the first Book  
Sprint
using the alpha-release of the collaborative writing platform, Booki
<http://www.booki.cc/> created by FLOSS Manuals.

The content is licensed with the free content CC-BY-SA Creative Commons
license, and is available free in its entirety (see below for links to
epub, html. pdf). You can also buy the (beautiful) printed book online
here:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/collaborative-futures/8407211

For a printed review copy please contact (limited copies available):
Cara Bell-Jones <cara@flossmanuals.net>

For more information about Book Sprints and FLOSS Manuals please
contact:
Adam Hyde <adam@flossmanuals.net>

---
COLLABORATIVE FUTURES
html:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/collaborativefutures/

epub:
http://www.transmediale.de/files/collaborativefutures-en-2010.01.29-09.49.56.epub

pdf:
http://www.transmediale.de/files/CollaborativeFutures.pdf
---

TO CONTRIBUTE
register: http://www.booki.cc/

edit (and read) the book here:
http://www.booki.cc/collaborativefutures/

---

BIOGRAPHIES
Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, an educator and a media activist from
Tel-Aviv, based in NY. His work explores media in public space and the
public space in media. In his creative research he focuses on the
perception of territory and borders and the way they are shaped through
politics, culture, networks and the World Wide Web. He is the co-founder
of Shual.com – a foxy design studio; ShiftSpace.org – an open source
layer above any website; YouAreNotHere.org – a dislocative tourism
agency; Kriegspiel – a computer game based on Guy Debord’s Game of War;
and the Tel Aviv node of the Upgrade international network. Mushon is an
honorary resident at Eyebeam – an art and technology center in New York.
He teaches new media research at NYU and open source design at Parsons
the New School of Design.

Mike Linksvayer is Vice President at Creative Commons, where he started
as CTO in 2003. Previously he co-founded Bitzi, an early open data/open
content/mass collaboration service, and worked as a web developer and
software engineer. In 1993 he published one of the first interviews with
Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. He is a co-founder and currently
active in Autonomo.us, which investigates and works to further the role
of free software, culture, and data in an era of software-as-a-service
and cloud computing. His chapter on "Free Culture in Relation to
Software Freedom" was published in FREE BEER, a book written by speakers
at FSCONS 2008. Linksvayer holds a degree from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in economics, a field which continues to
strongly inform his approach. He lives in Oakland, California.

Michael Mandiberg is known for selling all of his possessions online on
Shop Mandiberg, making perfect copies of copies on
AfterSherrieLevine.com, and creating Firefox plugins that highlight the
real environmental costs of a global economy on TheRealCosts.com. His
current projects include the co-authored groundbreaking Creative Commons
licensed textbook "Digital Foundations: an Intro to Media Design" that
teaches Bauhaus visual principles through design software;
HowMuchItCosts.us, a car direction site that incorporates the financial
and carbon cost of driving; and Bright Bike, a retro-reflective bicycle
praised by treehugger.com as “obnoxiously bright.” He is a Senior Fellow
at Eyebeam, and an Assistant Professor at the College of Staten
Island/CUNY. He lives in, and rides his bicycle around, Brooklyn. His
work lives at Mandiberg.com.

Marta Peirano writes about culture, science and technology for the
Spanish media, encompassing newspapers, online journals and printed
magazines. She is a long term contributor and founder of the online
media arts journal Elástico and is the author of "La Petite Claudine", a
widely read blog in the Spanish language about art, literature, free
culture, pornography (and everything in between). In 2003 and 2004 she
directed the Copyfight Festivals in Spain (CCCB, Santa Mónica) with her
collective Elástico, a symposium and exhibition that investigated
alternative models of intellectual property. Marta has given numerous
lectures and workshops on free culture, digital publishing tools and
journalism at festivals and universities. She recently published "El
Rival de Prometeo", a book about Automatas and the engineering of the
Enlightenment. She currently lives in Berlin and is working on a second
book.

Alan Toner was born in Dublin and studied law in Trinity College Dublin
and NYU Law School, where he was later a fellow in the Information Law
Institute and the Engelberg Center on Law and Innovation. His research
is focused on the  countervailing impact of peer processes and
information enclosure on cultural production and social life. In 2003 he
worked on the grassroots campaign 'We Seize!' challenging the UN World
Summit on the Information Society; he has participated extensively in
grassroots media and information freedom movements. Since 2006 he has
also worked in documentary film, including co-writing and co-producing
"Steal This Film 2" (2007). In 2008 he co-created the archival site
footage.stealthisfilm.com/. Currently he's writing a book on the history
of economic and technological control in the film industry. Sometimes he
can be found near Alexanderplatz, and at knowfuture.wordpress.com/.

Aleksandar Erkalovic is reknowned internationally in the new media arts
and activist circles for the software he has developed. He used to work
in Multimedia institute in Croatia, where he was the lead developer of a
popular NGO web publishing system (TamTam). Aleksander has a broad
spectrum of programming experience having worked on many projects from
multiplayer games, library software, financial applications, artistic
projects, and web site analysis applications, to building systems for
managing domain registration. Aleksander was for a long time the sole
programmer for FLOSS Manuals and is now leading the development
(together with Adam Hyde and Douglas Bagnall) of a new GPL-licensed type
of collaborative authoring and publishing platform called 'Booki'.
Aleksander's new media artistic collaborations have won many awards, as
well as being extensively exhibited internationally. Aleksander also
organises creative and educative workshops directed to young people,
experts, and amateurs that are interested in the software he has
developed and free software in general. He is currently also employed by
Informix in Zagreb, Croatia.

Adam Hyde was for many years a digital artist primarily exploring
digital-analog hybrid broadcast systems. These projects included The
Frequency Clock, Polar Radio, Radio-Astronomy, net.congestion, re:mote,
Free Radio Linux, Wifio, Paper Cup Telephone Network, Mobicasting,
Silent TV and others. Many of these projects have won awards and have
been widely exhibited internationally. Since returning from a residency
in Antartica in 2007 Adam founded FLOSS Manuals and has been focused on
increasing the quantity and quality of free documentation about free
software through FLOSS Manuals, exploring emerging methodologies for
collaborative book production (Book Sprints), and developing Booki with
Aleksander and Douglas. Adam has facilitated over 16 Book Sprints, is
also the co-founder (with Eric Kluitenberg) of the forthcoming
Electrosmog Festival for Sustainable Immobility and facilitator of the
forthcoming Arctic Perspectives technology cahier.

The cover design is by Laleh Torabi. Laleh is a designer and illustrator
based in Berlin and has been the designer for transmediale for several
years. Her website is <www.spookymountains.com>. Her latest book "Die
Freiheit der Krokodile" (The Freedom of the Crocodiles) has just been
released by Merve Verlag, Berlin.

                                 ###

With kind regards,

Cara Bell-Jones
cara@flossmanuals.net
UK +44 7792 807 005 (until 19/03/10)
DE +49 1638 114 214 (from 19/03/10)
www.flossmanuals.net


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