An interview with Global Ecovillage Network board member Giovanni Ciarlo from the GEN ecovillage in Huehuecotl, Mexico by BBC filmmaker Stuart Tanner and Planet Erstwild's James Moore.

Lonnie Gamble, KRUU host of Abundant Planet and founder of Fairfield's Abundant Ecovillage, joins the conversation, offering his insights and furthering the discussion with Giovanni.

Click the link to give a listen. 

 Mr. Ed Malloy is the mayor of Fairfield, Iowa, the home of KRUU 100.1 FM.
Ed recently spear headed a campaign, which got Fairfield designated, as
one of Iowa’s great places. The town will receive a five hundred
thousand dollar grant as a result. Mr. Malloy is also a successful
businessman who is currently President of Danaher Oil.

Richard Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. In 1999 he launched the Connexions project, a non-profit start-up that is aiming to bring the idea of "Rip, Mix, Burn" into the academic world. Connexions is a way for authors, educators, and learners worldwide to collaborate on all kinds of educational materials.

Richard vision is to revolutionize how we interact with textbooks, to make them more interesting, more current, and more relevant to individual academic curricula and institutions. The music world has benefited greatly by the ability to rip tracks, remix them into a different lineup, and customize tracks by our musical tastes. This is what Connexions will do for textbooks - create custom educational material to fit the learning/teaching styles of every user.

Other talks by Rchard Baraniuk:   read more »

Wendy Seltzer founded and leads the Chilling Effects clearinghouse, a project to study and combat the ungrounded legal threats that chill activity on the Internet. She also helped start and now leads
the Openlaw project, an experiment bringing
the methods of open source and Free Software development to legal
argument in the public interest. 

Ms. Seltzer is currently visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, where she will be teaching Internet Law and Privacy. She was previously a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, focused on intellectual property and free speech issues. She is also a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.  read more »

If you loved the haunting guitarwork from the movie Pulp Fiction, you'll love to hear this rare interview with Miserlou maestro heavy surf god guitar slinger Dick Dale by KRUU Lo-Fi host Scott Puffer.

The man who blew out 50 of Leo Fender's amps, a true American original, check out what he has to say about just about anything. 

Dick Dale invented surf music in the 1950's. Not the '60's as is commonly believed. He was given the title "King of the Surf Guitar" by his fellow surfers with whom he surfed with from sun-up to sun-down.

He met Leo Fender the guitar and amplifier Guru and Leo asked Dale to play his newly creation, the Fender Stratocaster Electric Guitar. The minute Dale picked up the guitar, Leo Fender broke into uncontrolled laughter and disbelief, he was watching Dale play a right-handed guitar upside down and backwards, Dale was playing a right-handed guitar left-handed and changing the chords in his head then transposing the chords to his hands to create a sound never heard before.

Dick Dale recently performed at the Picador in Iowa City.   read more »

Gary Garles interviews Bill Payne, co-founder of seminal rock band Little Feat.

Payne discusses how he contacted Frank Zappa's record label Bizarre Records, hooked up with Lowell George, and talks about the joy Little Feat experiences simply playing music. 

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing.

Bill Allison is Senior Fellow at the Sunlight foundation, and a veteran investigative reporter. Greg Elin is the chief data architect at Sunlight Labs, the technology wing of the Sunlight Foundation.  read more »

Vera Franz is Program Manager of the Open Society Institute's Information Program. In this capacity she leads the Open Information and Intellectual Property Reform programs.

The Information Program supports four initiatives which enable access to knowledge in poorer countries: a project on the reform of intellectual property; the eIFL library consortium; the Open Access Initiative, and an East-East translation program.

Vera Franz talked to me about the detailed problem with the current intellectual property/policy regimes around the world and the OSI's strategy for combatting the issues. Her experience monitoring and working with trade organizations such as the WTO and WIPO provides perspective on how the people drafting these regulations and policies deal with Open Source, Free Culture and transparent processes in general.

Heather Ford is a South African who has worked in the fields of Internet policy, law and management in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. She is the Executive Director of iCommons, a UK private charitable corporation.

Incubated by Creative Commons,
iCommons is an organisation with a broad vision to develop a united
global commons front by collaborating with open education, access to
knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world.

Heather joins me on Open Views to talk about her work at iCommons, the challenges of leading an international Free Culture organization, and Free Culture in South Africa.  read more »

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), started by Richard Stallman, is an advocacy organization promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute
computer programs. These rights are part of what the FSF considers as the freedoms for users of computer software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

John Sullivan is the Campaigns Manager at the FSF, and has been involved with the BadVista, PlayOgg and Defective by Design educational campaigns, aimed at shedding light on the restrictions imposed on consumers of technology.  read more »

My guest this week on Open Views is Joichi Ito, Chairman of Creative Commons and Chairman of Six Apart Japan.

Joi has received much recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan, and provided the initial venture capital (through his venture firm Neoteny Corp.) to Six Apart, the company that created Movable Type, Typepad and now owns LiveJournal.

He is on the board of Technorati, Digital Garage, WITNESS, Pia Corporation, Socialtext and iCommons. In October of 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004. In August of 2005, he joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation. He also served on the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) from March 2005 until April 2007.

As this all makes clear, Joi Ito is a serial entreprenuer and also a prolific Free Culture activist. He joins me on Open Views to talk about his work with Free Culture both in a global and Japanese context.  read more »

The Synaptic Leap is a project started by Ginger Taylor aiming to create enabling systems to make open source, collaborative development straightforward for biomedical researchers. The project bills itself as "Open Biomedical Research", and this is the topic of this week's show.

This week on Open Views I'm joined by Dr. Matthew Todd, lecturer in organic chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia. Dr. Todd's work in drug discovery for tropical diseases such as schistosomiasis is internationally recognized. He is also a proponent of the use of the Free/Open Source model for doing biomedical research in areas such as tropical diseases and biochemistry.

Dr. Matthew Todd is currently a research advisor at The Synaptic Leap, and we'll be talking about what Open Source in bio-medicine really means, how it is implemented, and what the impact of the Free/Open model is in biomedical research.  read more »

On this episode of Open Views I'm joined by Dr. Matthew Cockerill from BioMedCentral, a commercial Open Access publisher. BioMedCentral has a portfolio of 182 journals, a combination of both general titles such as the Journal of Biology, and much more specialized such as Malaria Journal and Biomedcentral Bioinformatics. All the research published by BioMed Central's journals is open access, but BioMed Central also provides access to various additional products and services that require a subscription. BioMed Central also operates Open Repository, a hosted digital repository solution for institutions.

Matthew Cockerill started off as Biomedcentral's first employee, back in 1999, and has since served in several roles: technical director, operations director, and now Publisher, which is essentially like the managing director. He agreed to a conversation to talk about his work at BiomedCentral, and also the relevance of the Open Access model in an interconnected world.

Music Credits: Saregama, Samadhi

Download Ogg-Vorbis version    read more »