Thanks everyone for coming out for a successful and engaging discussion at A Foundation. We got some really great feedback and are working on a next event in the fall on 'open source'. So please keep an eye out for the next one or get in touch if you would like to find out more about what we are working on. We are working hard over the summer in developing the project in different ways and are looking for collaborators who are interested to help work on events and a publication. A video of the 'Re-imagining Culture' event will be online shortly. We will have more updates for you soon.

Invited guest speakers:
Chair: Abbas Nokhasteh (director, Openvizor)
John Kieffer (editor of 'After the Crunch', creative director of Sound and Music)
William Wong (Clore Leadership Fellow, cultural consultant)
Sonya Dyer (artist, writer and co-ordinator of the Chelsea Programe, Chelsea College of Art&Design)

UNESCO invite you to participate in an online discussion dedicated to "Funding Culture, Managing the Risk: limits and opportunities for development cooperation" that will take place from 16 March to 6 April 2010.

Organized by UNESCO’s Culture Sector, the discussion is part of a series of initiatives conceived to further the culture and development agenda in the area of international development policy and programming, and to catalyze and help develop the international community’s policy, advocacy and action in this critical area.

This online discussion will focus on a specific area of concern within culture and development the perception of risks involved in cultural investments. Themes and questions will be provided to participants who will be invited to discuss 1) reasons for (mis)perceptions of the risks involved in investing in culture, 2) means to demystify and challenge such (mis)perceptions; and 3) strategies to increase the culture and development agenda’s visibility in development circles.

The discussion will be organized around the following three themes.

Week 1 (16 - 22 March) - Risk of Funding Culture: A Myth or a Reality?

Week 2 (23 - 29 March) - Dealing with Risk: What Works?

Week 3 (30 March - 6 April) - How to encourage investments in the culture sector?

"It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not arise by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely. "

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

"What do we mean by ‘freedom’? Should Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) necessarily be powered by radical politics of ownership and collaboration? Or is the latching of “Free Software” ideological baggage limiting the full transformative power of “Open Source”. How are these questions informed by licenses? Are some licenses more open than others? More ethical than others? This emotional debate has been in the heart of FLOSS from its early days and has created camps and animosities within the community.

"There is genius, dynamism and innovation in capitalism. Unfortunately, standard market theory does not properly allow it to be unlocked." argue Will Hutton and Philippe Schneider.

"Stimulated by the 'New Labour' government in the 1990s, the economic role and function of the UK's creative industries aroused international interest. Chris Smith, Britain's New Labour Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, confirmed early in his ministry that the creative industries were a growth sector of the UK economy, saying 'It is incumbent on the government, in partnership with industry, to take active steps to promote economic growth in the creative and cultural sector.

Adam Curtis (maker of The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora's Box..) recently blogged a response to a New Statesman article (http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2010/02/letter-inflation-economics-mpc) debunking economist jargon and nonesense.

C&binet was created by the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport in October 2008 to foster international dialogue over the creative economy and the 'Creative Britain' strategy paper published February 2008 by Department for Culture Media and Sport, (DCMS) jointly with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) and the Department for Innovation and Skills (DIUS).

Creative Britain’ contains 26 commitments designed to put culture and creativity at the centre of our national life and bring the creative industries into the mainstream of the UK economy.

The first main c&binet event took place on 26-28 October 2009 at The Grove in Hertfordshire and is currently watchable online. The conference brings together learning creative industry government officials and industry executives to discuss 'World Creative Business' and the emerging creative economy.

C&binet:
http://www.cabinetforum.org

Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy: http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/publications/3572.aspx/

Creating Cities: Culture, Space, and Sustainability - The City, Culture, and Society (CCS) Conference

25-26 February, 2010
IBZ Munich, Amalienstraße 38, D-80799 Munich / Germany

The conference Creating Cities: Culture, Space and Sustainability, investigates the forces that shape the conditions of urban development and the creation of cities in comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. In recent years, the notion of the "creative city“ has become a guiding framework for thinking about the present and future state of cities and their capability of coping with the impact and challenges of globalization. Cities are regarded as engines of regional, national, and global economic growth because they are the key centers for cultural production and consumption and target areas for mobility and migration. They are also contested sites because of increasing cultural and social diversity. Simultaneously, cities use cultural diversity and even counter-cultures to display appealing images and representations of creativity and innovation. Many citizens aspire to live and work in the cosmopolitan global environments that only metropolitan centers seem to be able to provide, but cities also provide vital space for the challenged, homeless, and other socially disadvantaged groups. The resolution of social disparities is consequently becoming an urgent policy task. Environmental and social sustainability, urban revitalization and amenity are major keywords of our time.

In this context, this conference focuses on the interactions among culture, sustainability, and space. We would like to emphasize inquiry into the dynamics of cultural creativity, industries and production, the risks and benefits of both cultural diversity and social inclusion or exclusion, the sustainability of efforts to plan and redesign the urban built environment to promote creativity, and the identity politics of representations of the city and creativity in the popular imagination as well as spaces of heritage and tourism. We recognize that there are many different groups and focal points related to creating cities, so one major purpose of this conference is to create a framework in which both practitioners and researchers of different disciplines can interact and share ideas about how urban environments are being transformed.

http://www.japan.uni-muenchen.de/veranstaltungen/index.html