Richard Poynder is a feelance journalist, with contributions in the Financial Times, Information Today, Information World Review, and a regular blogger on his Open and Shut blog. In 2003 Richard Poynder had the idea to write a book about the open source and free culture movements - focusing on the people behind the movements.

The interviews that Richard has compiled thus far include Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, Eric Raymond, founder of the Open Source Institute, Lawrence Lessig, creator of the Creative Commons license and the person who created the "free culture" monicker, Richard Jefferson, creator of the Biological Open Source License, and others.

The full text of his interviews and biographies can be found from his Open and Shut blog.

Richard agreed to speak with me about the free culture world and what he found to be interesting about the open source movements.

Kembrew McLeod is author of the Oboler Award winning book Freedom of Expression, and the documentary films Copyright Criminals and Money for Nothing.
Kembrew is currently Associate Professor at University of Iowa, in the Department of Communication Studies.
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John Wilbanks is currently the Executive Director of Science Commons

On this show I've spoken to editors from the Public Library of Science - Mark Patterson and Virginia Barbour - and to the Executive Director of Science Commons, John Wilbanks. They are all involved with the production and distribution portion of the Open Acces equation. What happens on the other side? How does Open Access affect an institution in the developing world, and does the model really have the promised benefits?

Are the problems stated by the Open Access movement "real", or just marketing?

To answer these questions, and to get a clear perspective from the end-user-side of Open Access, I spoke with Jennifer Papin-Ramcharan. Jennifer is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Librarian at the University of the West Indies, in Trinidad and Tobago. Jennifer agreed to talk to me about her experiences with Open Access.

Ethan Zuckerman founded GeekCorps, GlobalVoices and is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

After I spoke with Wayan Vota, currently Director of IESC-GeekCorps, about the work of Geekcorps in Mali. I wanted to get some more insights into why Geekcorps came into existence, from the person who founded the organization. But more importantly, I wanted to find out what has been learned from the collaborative model, global volunteerism, and the experiences working in Africa towards a better
society.

Ethan talked to me for almost 90 minutes, about his GeekCorps experiences, his work with the Berkman Center, and his ongoing work as a global activist. This is the abbreviated 45 minute version of the interview. The longer version is available by request.

Melissa Hagemann, my guest today on Open Views, is the program manager for the Information Program at the OSI. Melissa was profiled as a Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Innovator in December 2006 for her work promoting and facilitating Open Access.

Melissa could well be given the credit for the sucess of the Open Access movement. Considering the initiative is just over 5 years old, it's impressive that organizations as large as the National Institutes of Health have mandated are considering instituting that all the reseach they fund be released under an Open Access model and deposited into PubMed Central, the online digital library maintained by the NIH. Essentially this makes all NIH funded peer-reviewed articles completely freely available to anyone who wants it.

This week's guest on Open Views is Michel Bauwens , founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives at P2PFoundation.net.

Peer-to-Peer (or P2P) is most often thought of in terms of the file-sharing computer networks that have been vilified by the recording and movie industry associations, for allegedly permitting (if not encouraging) rampant digital content "piracy". But Michel takes the concept of peer networks, to the realm of society. We're creating a new world, where peer production is taking on traditional societal models. The most obvious example is Wikipedia - an encyclopedia designed to be created by collaborators, and gaining sufficient momentum (and arguable credibility) to take on the likes of
Brittanica. The success of the Wikipedia project could be attributed to peer production - basically global collaboration amongst a like-minded group.

(This recording is also available from archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/OpenViewsCoryDoctorow)

Cory Doctorow is currently a mostly full-time, award-winning science fiction author. His novels are all released under Creative-Commons licenses, and can be downloaded directly from his website at Craphound.com. Cory won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer for 2000, the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in 2003, and in 2004 he won the Sunburst award for best Canadian Science Fiction Book for his short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

Dr. David Lipman is currently the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which is a division of the National Library of Medicine within the National Institutes of Health . NCBI was created by Congress in 1988 to do basic research in computational biology, and to develop computational tools, databases and information systems for molecular biology.

After medical training, Dr. Lipman joined the Mathematical Research Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) as a Research Fellow. In his research on computational tools, he developed the most widely used methods for searching biological sequence databases. There are thousands of citations to Dr. Lipman’s methods in papers which have used them to discover biological functions for unknown sequences and which have thereby advanced the understanding of the molecular basis of human disease.

Doc Searls is one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as we know it , and Senior Editor of Linux Journal.

In August, 2005, Doc recieved the fist annual Google O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator.

In 2006, Doc was named a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Dean Jansen is part of the Special Projects team at the Participatory Culture Foundation. The PCF is the non-profit organization which creates the Democracy Internet TV Platform, soon to be named Miro.

DemocracyPlayer aims to change the way mass-media works, by giving control of Internet TV back to the public. You can control how you download, re-mix, and distribute different video channels. In essence DemocracyPlayer lowers the bar for anyone to create their own online TV channel.

Ronaldo Lemos is the director of the Center for Technology & Society (CTS) at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV) Law School in Rio de Janeiro, and Project Lead for Creative Commons in Brazil.

Ronaldo Lemos was professor of Sociology of Law at the University of Sao Paulo Law School and at the Brazilian Society for Public Law (SBDP). Professor Lemos is the author of several articles published in Brazil and abroad, and of two books, Comercio Eletronico (2001) and Conflitos sobre Nomes de Dominio e Outras Questes Juridicas da Internet (2003). He earned a J.D. from the University of Sao Paulo Law School, a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School, and a Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Sao Paulo.

Professor Lemos coordinates the Intellectual Property area at the FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro. He works with the Brazilian Federal Government in the implementation of its Free Software program, and with the Ministry of Culture in the implementation of its digital culture policy. He is one of the four members appointed by the Ministry of Justice to its electronic commerce commission.

Ethan Zuckerman joins me again on this week's Open Views, to talk about his current venture, Global Voices. The project is a citizen journalism initiative aimed at providing visibility into the global blogosphere. The project is not just a blog, and it's not a repository for journalists. Instead the objective is to bring out the voices in the global community and get a sense of what issues are being discussed around the world.

Ethan Zuckerman was a guest on Open Views a few months back, as founder of GeekCorps. Since his departure from GeekCorps he has become a fellow at the Berman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard Law School, which is where he co-founded Global Voices.

In 2002, Sunil Abraham was elected as a Fellow of Ashoka.org, an international organization whose mission is to promote positive social change by investing in social entreperneurs with innovative solutions that are sustainable and replicable.

Mahiti is the for-profit company that Sunil founded in 1998, in order to create simple, effective, and affordable solutions for non-profit and volunteer organizations, so that they could do their work better.

Sunil's work as an activist using free/open-source tools, his projects with organizations such as the Open Society Institute, the International Open Source Network, AsiaSource, and his presentations to a long list of both private, and public orgnizations have made him both an important and admired member of the larger Free and Open Source worlds. In addition to this non-profit he is also a successful social entrepreneur, as the Ashoka.org fellowship recognizes.