I was not able to attend the aCCCeso, a seminar on Creativity, Community and Science held on Nov 11-13 in my hometown, San José de Costa Rica, but my friends from Sula Batsu were there and they gave me the scoop. It was quite an innovative proposal in Costa Rica, where we have traditionally had more emphasis in discussing connectivity infrastructure, ICT access projects, and the entrepreneurial side of IT as an opportunity for economic development. The fact that this event included discussions on copyright, learning networks, knowledge sharing and alternative media is definitively a step forward.
Lucky for all of us, my friend Juliana Rincón did an amazing job live-blogging the whole thing. Her notes in Spanish, are in her own blog if you scroll down a bit.
This second Open Translation Tools event, held in Amsterdam in June 2009 co-organized by Aspiration, was a follow up of the fun we had in Zagreb on 2007. The other organizers were Flossmanuals.net and Translate.org.za. These events bring together people working in the field of open content translation to assess the state of software tools that support translation of content that is licensed under free or open content licenses.
You can read almost all the notes from the sessions and break out groups at the Event Wiki. Which, by the way, is one of my favorite things about Aspiration events: you can read about it in great detail, practically the same day. What you cannot do from the wiki is to bear witness to the Cultural Beverage night, but that’s a different story.
After the event, we spent five days at The Waag in a beautiful room, concentrated on a Book Sprint. Using the Flossmanuals.net platform for collaborative writing, the group in the room plus a group of remote participants, was able to finish a great resource that basically compiles the most important topics in the subject of open translation. It covers some basic concepts, an overview of the translation workflow, a few issues such as quality control and community management, special case studies and specific resources for translating text, video and images. You can read the book online, download it as pdf or buy a print version.
In November 2008, Francia Alfaro and I traveled to Chile to help with the facilitation of the CCLearn workshop, as part of the event LatAmCommons, organized among others by our friends from DerechosDigitales.org.
This workshop was a bit unusual, but the results were great. The discussions in breakout groups had the following topics: Open Access to Information, Educational System and Open Education, Licensing issues around educational materials, Collaborative Production in the context of open education, and Public Policy. We also had a session on Project Mapping and Trend Mapping, and we closed with a “peer assist” session of projects looking for specific feedback. I have more detailed notes of the sessions that I can share if you’re interested. Drop me a line!
* Photo by Claudio Ruiz
