After several months of planning by Creative Commons Taiwan, the international workshop “Open & Free: New Enterprise in The Information Age” will take place in Taipei on Janurary 10. 2007. The workshop program includes one keynote speech by Creative Commons board member James Boyle, four seminar sessions (Culture, Science, Collaboration, and Creativity), and two open discussion sessions. The workshop will be web-casted starting at 9 am local time (UTC+8).

“The issues of commons, about how people organize themselves in creating and sharing resources together, have never been more relevant than today,” said Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the public lead of Creative Commons Taiwan. “This workshop aims to bring together experts and stake-holders abroad and at home to disseminate the ideals, practices, and challenges of digital commons in this information age.” It is hoped that by sharing the vision and experience about the commons, he said, we will better understand the issues at hand and will further participate in the new enterprise.

The workshop will open with James Boyle’s keynote on “Distributed Creativity and the Logic of Control”, and is followed by presentations from Ronaldo Lemos (FGV Brazil and Creative Commons Brazil) and Ming-Chorng Hwang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) in the Culture session. It then continues with talks from Science Commons’ Thinh Nguyen and Academia Sinica’s Kwang-tsao Shao in the Science session.

In the afternoon, the Collaboration jam session will showcase, among others, TaiwanBaseballWiki and the Open Content Library. Developers Jon Phillips (Creative Commons) and Jedi Lin (Creative Commons Taiwan) will initiate a dialog with the session speakers and workshop participants on commons-based collaborative development. In the Creativity session, renowned creators — artists, musicians, and legal scholars — will lead a discussion on how the laws are shaping the conditions of artistic creations.

An open discussion session will conclude the workshop with Catharina Maracke (Creative Commons International), Ronaldo Lemos, and Tyng-Ruey Chuang inviting the workshop participants to share their thoughts about Creative Commons’ jurisdiction projects and the broader trans-border free culture movement.

The workshop is sponsored by the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan — the host of Creative Commons Taiwan — and is supported by a grant from Taiwan’s National Science Council. The workshop proceedings can be freely downloaded from Creative Commons Taiwan’s web site.