The eleventh annual Media That Matters Film Festival is taking place once again in New York City! More than a film festival, Media That Matters inspires and impacts audiences across the globe. Covering a vast array of topics from LGBT youth, autism awareness, biased-based bullying, immigration and much more, the eleventh annual collection will feature thirteen new shorts.

Arts Engine invites you to their World Premiere, Thursday October 27, 7:00 p.m. at the SVA Theatre in New York. General admission tickets, discounted tickets for educators, and free tickets for students are available at http://mediathatmatters11.eventbrite.com.

Following the premiere, Arts Engine will host a series of panels on Friday, October 28th at SOCDOC (the documentary program at the School of Visual Arts), geared towards filmmakers, educators and activists. And on Saturday, October 29, Arts Engine will present Women and Girls Matter, a look at the obstacles and opportunities for women and girls in film making and new media.

The festival serves as the launch to Arts Engine’s year-long campaign to inspire audiences to screen, act, and create impact with the eleventh annual Media That Matters film collection. The films will be made available online under CC BY-NC-ND starting October 27th at 8 p.m.

For more info, visit the website and watch this video made with Arts Engine in 2008 explaining how CC has helped filmmakers in the Media that Matters film festival.

Now in it’s tenth year, the festival showcases twelve social justice shorts selected by a fantastic jury of filmmakers and activists. New this year is the impACT salon which will allow attendees the chance to meet the festival filmmakers, learn about the festival’s presenting partners, and will include free ice cream from the Raw IceCream Company.

Following the premiere, the films will be available for purchase under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license on region-free unencrypted DVDs.

On Sunday May 30th at 2PM, Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn will play host to over 60 artists in a day-long celebration of remix and collaborative creation. Produced by The League of Independents (LOFI), the RE/Mixed Media Festival is a means of contributing to the ongoing conversation about remixing, mashups, creative appropriation, copyright law, fair use, and the freedom of artists to access their culture in order to add to and build upon it… Galapagos [will be transformed] into a multimedia art space for a full day/evening of remixed film, video, music, performance, sound, painting, photography and fashion. Panel discussions will include artists talking about the pros and cons of appropriation and collaborative art, moderated by social media activist and author, Deanna Zandt; a talk about DMCA takedowns with Elizabeth Stark and Kenyatta Cheese; and a panel on ‘Extending Game Culture’ featuring Jesper Juul, Paul Jannicola, and Kerria Seabrooke, and moderated by Josephine Dorado. The event is free and will also be streamed live on the festival’s website at www.remixedmedia.org.

The premiere will take place at The Visual Arts Theater (Google Map) and will include not only the films featured but also a salon with some of the MTM presenting partners and a chance to meet the festival filmmakers. Be sure to purchase tickets in advance if you wish to attend in person.

Following the premiere, the films will be available for purchase under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license on region-free unencrypted DVDs. This allows activists, educators, fans, and audiences to host their own non-commercial screenings of the shorts without having to negotiate complex contracts with MTM and the many different filmmakers participating in the festival. Those interested should preorder a DVD, check out MTM’s DIY Screening Guide, and add themselves to the list of existing screenings.

Visit the festival’s site for details, schedules, and downloads. Also, check out the video that Creative Commons and Arts Engine collaborated on in late 2008 that explains how CC licenses have helped filmmakers in the Media that Matters festival (more info and download available here).

• Flat World Knowledge (as mentioned earlier today),
• Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU),
• and a dynamic panel of K-12 technologists and educators (my personal favorite from the event).

All videos are available via CC BY, of course. I’d also like to point out that the Hewlett OER Grantees meeting is going on right now, which you can follow with the hashtag #oerhf.

The Creative Commons Salon NYC is back in action on March 3rd at the Open Planning Project‘s uber cool penthouse space from October. The theme for this salon is “Opening Education”, and if you don’t really know what that means, think CC licenses as applied to various learning contexts and you’re off to a good start. To learn more, come by for a good time and free (as in beer) beer. The basic line-up is as follows:

• Eric Frank, founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Flat World Knowledge, a commercial textbook publishing company that is leveraging CC licenses as part of their business model—basically offering free digital textbooks via CC BY-NC-SA, but charging for the prints and supplementary materials. (Is this business model working? Come and find out!) Eric was previously “Director of Marketing for Prentice Hall Business Publishing, a division with annual sales in the hundreds of millions.”
• Neeru Paharia, co-founder of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), a grassroots education project that moves learning outside of institutional walls (for free) by leveraging the internet, social software, and CC licensed content. Neeru is formerly the Executive Director of Creative Commons and is finishing up her doctorate at the Harvard Business School in Behavioral Economics.
• A panel of K-12 technologists/educators on the cutting edge of their fields who incorporate CC licenses and social media into their classrooms. They will give a run-down on what they do, how they do it, and answer questions about the challenges they face from curious folk like you. The panel consists of:  Dave Bill, Technology Integrator at the Dwight School and TEDxNYED organizer; arvind s grover, co-host of 21st Century Learning (a podcast about… 21st century learning) and Director of Technology at the Hewitt School (also a TEDxNYED organizer); and Kerri Richardson Redding, Director of Academic Technology at the Brooklyn Friends School.

I’ll also be available as the Communications Coordinator for Creative Commons to give updates on CC in education and answer your general questions. John Britton (Lead Developer at Flat World Knowledge) will also be available to talk about his experience organizing the Mozilla Drumbeat/P2PU course, “Mashing Up the Open Web.”

THE DETAILS (RSVP for updates!):

Wednesday, March 3rd, from 7-10pm
The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette St
Between Grand & Howard
New York, NY

Beer is courtesy of Flat World Knowledge and we are generously being hosted by Gotham Schools, “an independent news source about the New York City Public Schools” that is “an initiative of The Open Planning Project, a Manhattan-based nonprofit dedicated to empowering civil society through technology.” If you’ve didn’t make it to any past CC Salons, don’t miss this one, and if you did, you’ll know to come early as space is limited.

RSVP to the event via Facebook or by e-mailing me: janepark [at] creativecommons.org.

TEDxNYED is one of those spinoffs—”an all-day conference dedicated to examining the intersection of education, new media, and technology, will take place on March 6, 2010 in New York City.” The speaker line-up includes our own Larry Lessig (founder and board member of CC), Michael Wesch (a cultural anthropologist who created those awesome YouTube videos like “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”), Neeru Khosla (Co-founder of the CK12 Foundation that submitted seven open textbooks to California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative), and David Wiley (big thinker in open education and associate professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at BYU).

CC Learn is partnering with TEDxNYED and Whipple Hill to help with this amazing event. With currently 300 or so people expected to attend, space is limited, so please apply if you would like to join. “TEDx NYED is particularly seeking applicants who work in and around education and who are dedicated to reforming schools from the inside-out as well as outside-in. Those interested in attending should apply at http://tedxnyed.com/apply.”

From the press release,

“TED is an annual event where some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited
to share what they are most passionate about. “TED” stands for Technology,
Entertainment, Design — three broad subject areas that are, collectively, shaping our
future… The diverse audience — CEOs, scientists, creatives, philanthropists — is
almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Jane
Goodall, Frank Gehry, Paul Simon, Sir Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Bono.
…
At the TEDx NYED event, live speakers, two Ted Talks videos, and networking
sessions will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The
TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx
events, including ours, are self-organized.”

All TED Talks are licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

Wikis Take Manhattan is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and StreetsWiki articles covering sites and street features in Manhattan and across the five boroughs of New York City.

Scheduled for Saturday, October 10, 2009, this event will be a sequel to the spring 2008 Wikipedia Takes Manhattan (WTM-1) and last fall’s Wikis Take Manhattan (WTM-2) event. Check out the hoppin’ Wikipedia page for full details.

The day will be sponsored by Free Culture @ Columbia, the Columbia University chapter of Students for Free Culture, in cooperation with Free Culture @ NYU, The Open Planning Project, Wikimedia New York City and Wikipedia volunteers.

If you’re attending, make sure to register online here.

All Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians are invited to participate in teams of up to three (no special knowledge is required at all, just a digital camera and a love of the city).

Just a quick reminder that October’s CC Salon NYC is Monday night!

We’ve got a brand new home for the Salons – the Open Planning Project has generously offered their incredible penthouse.

So come out to have some beers with the CC community watch some cool presentations, and meet some new faces in the free culture space.

October’s Salon will feature short presentations from Adam Clark Estes, director of citizen journalism at the Huffington Post Investigative Fund talking about how the HuffPo is using CC to fuel the future of journalism, Shelley Bernstein, Chief Technology Officer of the Brooklyn Museum discussing their amazing community and commons efforts, and myself discussing some current CC projects, achievements, and a sneak peak at what I’ve been working on for the Creative Commons Network.

Here are the details:

Monday, October 5th, from 7-10pm
The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette St
Between Grand & Howard
New York, NY

We’ll have free (as in beer) beer. If you’ve didn’t make it to any past CC Salons, don’t miss this one, and if you did, you’ll know to come early as space is limited.

RSVP to the event via Facebook or by e-mailing me: fred [at] creativecommons.org.

Here’s io9′s summary:

The essay, called “Crazy Friend,” is a winding, mildly obsessive tale of how Dick’s stories guided Lethem out of childhood, into a turbulent adolescence, and at last settled him in a career as a critically-acclaimed writer. He begins by talking about his boyhood relationship with two cool older girls who didn’t get why he thought Dick’s writing was so important, and ends by introducing us to Lethem’s life as a Dick fanboy and showing us snippets of his early writing about Dick (some interesting stuff). Ultimately, Lethem says, Dick is the archetypal “crazy friend” whom we’ve all known. And whom we all love.

Lethem has a new book coming out on October 13th called Chronic City and he’ll be doing an epic reading of the entire book around NYC city book stores starting October 16th.