Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by governments, giving the creator of an original work of authorship exclusive rights to it. The copyright law allows an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. (Source: Wikipedia)

But with the advent of Internet and other new technologies another cultural movement called Open Source emerged, which is:

“..the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often copyrighted.”

In this culture the users are granted unprecedented access to each other so the Internet allows even greater access to inexpensive digital media and storage. This culture gave rise to the “copyleft” licenses.

Copyleft may be characterized as a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some but not all rights under copyright law. Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain (where no copyright restrictions are imposed), copyleft allows an author to impose some but not all copyright restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would otherwise be considered copyright infringement.

Image credit: laihiu used under a Creative Commons license

The most popular of the copyleft licensing is Creative Commons. Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works such as websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc.

(Founded in 2001) Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses.

These licenses allow creators to easily communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators. (Source: Wikipedia)

Here is a video explaining Creative Commons:

An excerpt from the video:

When you share your creativity you're enabling people anywhere to use it, learn from it, and be inspired by it. If you share your creative wealth, you can accomplish great things. There are millions of other peoples all around the planet who are working together to create a better, richer and more vibrant culture, using creative commons.

Here is a slide show explaining how you can share your works using Creative Commons. Creative Commons International (CCi) has developed licenses for numerous international jurisdictions.

In the Global Voices citizen media summit in Budapest it was a great opportunity for some of us to attend a brief workshop on Creative Commons by Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons and a board member of Global Voices.

Joi said that many use an ‘all rights reserved' content (photo, text etc.) without consent because they feel that they will not get the permission to use it or it will cost a lot of money which they cannot afford. But they still want to have it and so they become desperate to use it without permission. If most of those works had Creative Commons Licenses the users would be happy to attribute them for non-commercial purposes and link back to the originator. This in turn could promote the work and make it popular as well as retain its commercial value as commercial users would have to buy the permission anyway.

So it is important that we build a culture of licensing our work with creative commons.

Image “The Spectrum of Licenses” by cambodia4kidsorg and used under a Creative Commons license

The conditions of the Creative Commons Licenses are explained below:

Attribution (by): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.

Noncommercial or NonCommercial (nc): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for noncommercial purposes.

No Derivative Works or NoDerivs (nd): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it.

ShareAlike (sa): Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.

Use of Creative Commons licensed works - best practices:

Texts and links: When you use some texts or links posted on someone else's blog place it inside inverted comas or use quote tag and link to them. It does not take too long to link, and it is the norm in the blogosphere.

Pictures: Credit the photo to the photographer and include a link to the site by a simple sentence such as ‘Image: (Title) by (Photographer) used under a Creative Commons License'. Link the url of Photo to the ‘Title', author’s name to the ‘Photographer' and link the actual license page (if available) to the ‘Creative Commons License' portion. Don't use the pictures for commercial purposes without consent such as for producing merchandise for sale.

It is always important to give credit where credit is due. This is a detailed guide on “How to provide attribution in the Blogging World“.

Here are some useful links to search contents licensed under Creative Commons:

Related: Working with photos in your Blog.

Thumbnail image: “Some rights reserved” by trekkyandy used under a Creative Commons License

As a citizen journalist you will be using a lot of photos for your reports, blogs and photo blogs.

What I will discuss here today is specially targeted for the citizen journalists who work on computers with low bandwidth internet connections. Large and high resolution images eat up a lot of bandwidth, which means it will take longer both to upload your images to the internet and longer for your local readers to load the webpage. It only takes a second to download a 100KB image using T1 connection but for the same image it can take more than a minute with a 14.4k dial-up connection.

By optimizing your pictures, you can save both your own time and that of your readers while still publishing attractive and compelling photographs. The JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group, pronounced “jay-peg”) format is the standard for working with compressed photographs online.

The megapixel myth

Digital cameras have become much more affordable in recent times, and many mobile phones also have cameras that allow photographs to be saved and uploaded to the web via USB cable or MMS (similar SMS, but with photo or video).

Some new cameras often charge more because they have more megapixels, but what actually does that actually mean?

Ken Rockwell says:

It's all a myth because the number of megapixels (MP) a camera has, has very little to do with how the image looks. Even worse, plenty of lower MP cameras can make better images than poorer cameras with more MP.

(Image courtesy: Logan S.)

The most important thing about shooting photographs is the use of light and composition. A three megapixel camera is enough if you do not want to print a large version of your photo. A five megapixel camera has little difference with a three megapixel camera in quality but a lot in price.

And most importantly the more megapixels an image has, the more space it takes up, and the longer it takes to upload to the web. A three megapixel image takes up an average of 500KB space in JPG format whereas a five megapixel image will take up an average of three times more (1500KB). So use lower megapixel settings in your camera if you have to upload photos with a slow net speed. Or, alternatively, you can optimize your photos so that they are smaller in file size before you upload them to the internet.

Optimizing pictures

The best way to get your images ready for the internet is by optimizing them. There are many online and offline image editing tools available. While online image editors like Picnik and Photoshop Express offer many of the same features as expensive software you have to install on your computer, the web pages take a long time to load on slow internet connections. If you are able to install software on your computer, Picasa is a great free image editor and organizer by Google which easily allows you to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, a free photo-sharing service. Picopti offers some tips on how to improve your photographs using Picasa.

The best way to reduce the size of your photos is to resize them. A three megapixel photo will have 2048 X 1536 pixels and will take a space of about 500KBs. If you reduce that to 500 X 375 pixels you will see that the size has reduced to almost 100KB and with tools like Adobe Photoshop or Picasa you can even reduce it futher to 20Kbs or less, though this can affect the quality of the image.

(Image courtesy: Oso)

If you don’t have the software on the PC in a cyber cafe, don’t worry. You can even do it with MS paint, which is included for free on Windows. Try image-> stretch/skew-> 25% - horizontal / 25%- vertical (or other attributes) and save the result. See how the image size is reduced.

Now while posting the picture in your blog you can adjust the length and width with the tools in your blogging platform. If you want to do it manually according to your need you can use this tutorial about adjusting height and width and using the align=”left” “right” or “center” tags. You can also directly link to the source of the photo from another website (or your photo archive in Flickr). It is advisable to only use the same or a smaller version of the image when using these adjustments. Remember if you make the photos look bigger than their actual size, the image quality will be very poor.

If you have multiple photos in a page you can use the tools of blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger to upload the picture and posting thumbnails. By posting “thumbnails” (smaller versions of the original photograph), you can let your readers load your web page faster and then click on the images that interest them to see them in larger sizes.

It is important to use the ALT tag to describe each image so that it shows up in search returns as well as make your blog more accessible to blind users who depend on programs that read the text of a web page aloud.

Postings other’s images and copyright issues

If you want to post others' pictures in your blog, you can use photo sharing sites like Flickr to search for a suitable image. But one thing you need to be aware of is that those pictures are the property of others. So before using them you need to get their permission.

Increasingly, people are assigning creative commons licenses to reserve their rights while also letting people use the photos for free under some conditions. The most important of these conditions is the attribution policy. That means you have to give the creator of the image credit in the manner specified by the license. Another important condition is to mention whether the photos can be used for non-commercial purposes.

Usually personal blogs are non-commercial initiatives so crediting the photo owner saves you a lot of trouble if you are not sure of the license or can’t contact the author. The author will contact you if he/she feels you are violating his/her right and the photo can be taken down. But it is always important to give credit where credit is due.

You can search for photographs published with Creative Commons licenses at Open Photo and on Flickr.

Photo hosting

You can upload, organize, and share your photographs using Picasa Web, Flickr, and Photobucket. All three websites allow you to easily publish the photos you upload onto your blog. A list of more photo sharing websites is available on Wikipedia.

The first video blogs or ‘vlogs' (using video for blogging) started to appear as late as 2004. Finding a hosting solution to the large video files was still a problem. With the increasing popularity of YouTube in 2005, internet users had access to the free uploading of videos and could now easily embed those videos in their blogs for distribution. Soon, similar sites emerged to cater the growing number of video publishing enthusiasts. With the proliferation of devices like the video iPod, the vlog revolution soon reached a million videos online. Many of today's mobile phones are now equipped with high quality video options which are increasingly being used by vloggers and as a citizen media tool. Mainstream media outlets, like CNN's iReport, also make spaces for citizen journalists to share and distribute their videos.

Videos are increasingly being used as an advocacy tool by citizen media activists around the world. Sites like Witness uses videos and online technologies to expose human rights violations across the world. In places like Tibet where media is censored the citizen media video reports are one of the only ways to know what is happening.

Although online video is revolutionizing how we find out about the world around us, the tool is still predominantly concentrated in the developed world. The challenges of video blogging in developing countries are manifold. Bandwidth is still an issue in many countries in Africa and parts of Asia. Internet speed is still in the dial-up era in many countries, making simple text blogging with images difficult enough. Will the developing world be left out of the digital video revolution?

If citizen media activists are aware of bandwidth and compressions they can overcome the bandwidth problem. This wiki guide by Beth Kanter uses Cambodia as a case-study of how to upload video from regions with slow internet connectivity. It has also lots of great tips about shooting, editing, uploading, hosts and compression.

Photo by Steve Garfield, published under a creative commons license.

To learn about video blogging check the MIT New Media Literacies Media Producer Profile Series.

Make internet TV is also a comprehensive guide which has step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed by millions of people.

There are already great grassroot projects working with video in the developing world, such as two of the finalists of Stockholm challenge from Bangladesh and India:

Unnayan TV:

Unnayan TV (Development TV) is the first Bangladesh online video channel which publishes video contents on development, human rights and educational issues related to Bangladesh. With the motto “Local content and global voice” it features glimpses of the the unreported Bangladesh and has plans to create a space for marginalized communities to make their own voices heard.

It is a non-profit project of Machizo, a multimedia and communication organisation in Dhaka, and receives no outside funding. The videos published so far are the work of Machizo staff and the students of Media Studies and Journalism at the University of Liberal Arts of Bangladesh (ULAB) where Machizo founder Mr. Shahjahan Siraj teaches multimedia.

Digital Green:

Digital Green is a project of Microsoft Research that seeks to disseminate targeted agricultural information to small-scale, rural farmers in India through digital video. The system includes a digital video database, which is produced by farmers and experts. The content within this repository is meant to enable farmers to progressively improve their trade.

Launched in September 2006 by Microsoft Research India's “Technology for Emerging Markets” team, a live deployment of a prototype is currently in development with the GREEN Foundation in villages near the Karanataka and Tamil Nadu-state borders in India.

The scope of Digital Green is the popularization of sustainable farming practices in the 12 villages in which the system is currently deployed and it demonstrated early successes.

Do you know of other video blogging projects in the developing world? Let us know with a comment below.

However, with the proliferation of mobile communication in regions such as the Indian Sub-Continent and Sub-Saharan Africa, internet access has reached remote rural areas without the need of additional infrastructure like cables and land lines. But the potential of this phenomenon is largely yet to be harnessed.

Non-Profits are the Key

The not for profit organizations or NGOs as they are known in some parts of the world have a wider influence on the population of the developing countries. In some countries they contribute by sustaining a large workforce and their development budgets frequently make up a major part of the economy. These non-profit organizations have the capacity to use this technology on a wider scale and, thereby, to inspire a communication revolution among the people they serve. So when we talk about bringing the fruit of social media to each and every person in the world, we cannot progress much without enlisting the help of non-profits.

The digital divide

Which side of the digital divide are the non profits and NGOs? First let us look at the developed countries. In the USA, the Overbrook Foundation had released a report assessing some of the foundation's human rights grantees use of Web 2.0 tools. Some findings are:

• Most of the organizations use the web more as a source of information than as a tool for connecting with others.
• Roughly half of the organizations — in most cases, the larger ones — maintain blogs.
• Respondents experienced a great deal of frustration in determining which tools to use and where to turn for help.
• Participants felt a generation gap with the new technology. “I’m always trying to catch up to my younger staff members.”

If the exposure of non-profits from developed countries to social media look like this then imagine the state of non-profits in developing countries. They are still in the process of incorporating to the digital age. Slowly, more and more non-profit institutions are making their web presence felt. But their web presence is mostly characterized by static web 1.0 websites which don't allow for participation or interaction. They remain typical brochure sites with nothing more than a mission statement, some advertisements, rarely updated newsletters, a few photos, contact information, and zero interaction.

Nepal’s ASMITA is a powerful advocacy organization where a small group of female media activists are playing a pivotal role in the country’s history. ASMITA uses many forms of media. “It acts as a print magazine, a media campaign for women’s rights, a research group, a media watchdog, a TV and radio producer and a publisher of educational literature.” But what it does not have are participatory web media tools like blogs, videos, podcasts.

More than 20,000 NGOs work in Bangladesh. The official websites of Bangladesh’s two big NGOs BRAC and Grameen have still yet to incorporate web 2.0 applications on a visible scale.

In the era of Web 2.0, non-profits must take their online messages to a new level. Using social media tools like blogs, podcasts, videos and collaborative wikis they can initiate more interaction, make their work more interactive, and can positively distribute their message. We have seen that there is occasionally mistrusts among people regarding certain non-profits, which are not always transparent about their activities. When communicating with interactive social media, stakeholders and supporters can have each have better understandings of each other and ascertain whether everything is working properly.

What is social media or web 2.0?

Techsoup explains web 2.0 in the context of the non-profits:

“Web 2.0″ to me is the building of community and collaboration on a website — wikis, social-networking, user-created content, repurposed content, people interacting publicly through a website, users interacting with staff and with each other.”

The advantages of web 2.0:

You do not need special programming skills to use these tools.

Most of them are free or extremely low cost.

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to non-profits and individuals who want to effectively use social media. She writes in the Read Write Web:

Non-profits that integrate Web 2.0 tools and techniques effectively into their communications and programming strategies are reaping many benefits….

…In a recent blog discussion on the Netsquared community blog, some nonprofit techies believed that the answer is actually a change of mindset. Their point was that non-profits need to adopt a new philosophy of making their constituents the distributors of their message, and their work. To facilitate this shift, there is a need to educate more non-profits about what possibilities Web 2.0 tools offer and the practical ways to get started. It took years and small steps for many in the nonprofit sector to make the leap from fax machines to email - and it'll be the same when taking the leap from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

Seth Godin's free one-pager for non-profits courtesy of Npower New York and Squidoo.

Examples of the use of social media tools

• Flickr as Nonprofit Documentation Tool: What happens when you give a grantmaker a camera and flickr account? An interesting use of Flickr as a documentation tool! Also look at the International NGOs flickr group.
• Wiki Adoption in Organizations: Wikis are good for creating a collaborative and flexible knowledge base.

Best practices for non-profits using web 2.0

“How are smart non profits using the power of the web to spread information and have virtual conversations with their supporters? Who are using the web to deliver their message, but more crucially, to engage audiences in a conversation?”

Alexandra Samuel answers those questions in Social Signal quoting some of the best practices:

• The UN Foundation has had a dazzling success with its Nothing But Nets site, which focuses specifically on providing malaria nets to kids in the developing world.
• Invite your community to make contributions other than money. The web is a great place to ask for other kinds of contributions — whether that means connecting people directly with people who need their expertise or services (as in Nabuur) or asking them to share their personal experiences (as with the March of Dimes' Share your Story project).

Check the rest here.

Why is the Web 2.0 is important for small local non-profits?

Ken Goldstein writes that using interactive applications, two-way online communications and user-generated content the established core constituency of a non-profit can be expanded wider, possibly transforming it to a global powerhouse. Some advantages:

• Blogging communicates with the target audience more frequently and more cost-effectively than newsletters and appeal letters.
• RSS feeds of blogs, videos, etc., allow supporters to receive, read, and act upon the communications at their own pace.

How non-profits can start leveraging Social Media

Masternewmedia prescribes ten ways to do it.

If, as a decision-maker of a non-profit, you still are not convinced of the power of new media, then read Beth Kanter’s entire Blog dedicated to the theme: “How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media.”

Tag: nptech

Via Juliana Rincon we learn about a special bicycle in operation in Caquetá, Colombia:

“It seats two and carries with it a complete radio broadcasting system, able to send out Wi-max signals and be heard not only through the Andaquí Community Radio, but live through Internet as well“.

Radiocicleta [ES] is a community communication project which is breaking down the walls between the studio and the town itself:

“It is sustainable, it is cheap to maintain, it is environmentally sound, it is human instead of fuel powered, it allows for innovation and investigation, it can reach many different places and can be brought inside homes and it brings people together, working as members of a team,” Juliana says.

Affordable internet kiosk with mobile internet

Bangladesh has a population of more than 140 million. Its tele-density was very low only a decade ago because of the inadequate land phone infrastructure (it did not have penetration in rural areas). But thanks to the growth of the mobile phone companies now the number of mobile phone users has risen to 32 millions in a few years and the coverage is across the country even in the remotest of places. The growth rate of the cell phone industry is close to 25% which is remarkable.

In a country where the internet users are less than 1% (only a million) these mobile networks have brought an excellent opportunity for the nation to be connected to the internet which would not be possible with the current network of traditional landphones or expensive dsl cable connections. Some of the operators even support EDGE technology which offers data transfer speeds of up to 128 kb/s.

Using this mobile internet facility people in rural Bangladesh are building telecenters or internet cafés for use of mass people. From this website we learn that the technology required for such internet kiosks is very simple:

“There's only one PC, which functions as a server: each of the other workstations is powered by a small device, not much bigger than a cigarette packet. For another, there's no wired connection between the server and the outside world. The clue to how it's done is provided by a Motorola clamshell mobile phone connected by a USB cable to the server. The Centre is getting its Internet connection via an Edge-enabled mobile phone!”

Using Ndiyo-type thin-client networking in combination with Open Source software dramatically reduces the Total Cost of Ownership of Internet cafes, networked classrooms and small office systems. In the process, it makes it possible for entrepreneurs like Abu Sufian, the proprietor of the Fultola CIC, to make investments which earn revenues for them by providing services to local people and organizations.”

I believe these successes of innovative technologies based on internet can be replicated in all developing countries in the world.