Hi, I'm Ruth from Furtherfield.org a London-based, artist-led org for  
making, discussing and promoting networked media art running since 1997

Wow! it's been great reading all these different approaches to the  
topic.

So...from my first to present experiences with open source software  
and connected ideas of openness ...

- Encounters, through my work with Furtherfield.org, with other  
artists' projects that use and connect with the tools, themes and  
preoccupations of openness by Andy Deck, Sal Randolf, Ele Carpenter,  
Simon Yuill, Take2030, Armin Medosch, Julian Priest and many, many  
others.

- Working with Gimp, Inkscape, and finding free and or opensource  
software to manipulate files for use within Furtherfield.org's  
collaborative online mixing platform VisitorsStudio (see http:// 
visitorsstudio.org).

- During Open Congress and Node.London 2005-6 (check out http:// 
nodel.org)- I became interested in what openness meant at the  
intersection of the cultures of FLOSS, Activism and Art. Thinking  
about how openness impacted on the organisation, decision making, the  
events and the tools of Node.London. Felix Stalder's text helped me  
to think about this and to make some useful distinctions. Here's the  
venn diagram I made http://tinyurl.com/5z4m3c ... and my thoughts in  
more detail http://tinyurl.com/5kvm99

- Also during the Open Congress in 2005, Maryanne Francis attempted  
to open source a physical artwork and considered the way in which the  
success of open source methodologies might be said to promote notions  
of unlimited resources and growth, which in turn may be problematic  
in the context of ecology and climate change.

- In 2005 we installed our first Drupal site (a very well supported  
open source content management system for community building) on the  
Furtherfield server. We now run 3 or 4 quite different projects from  
that one installation- It has been a positive experience of working  
with a platform that one knows is being developed by people who  
understand online collaboration and constructing meaning together.

- Finally, I have been reading Steps to an Ecology of Mind, an  
anthology of writing by Gregory Bateson (hybrid anthropologist,  
social scientist, cyberneticist and more). It contains a small  
collection of riveting conversations with his daughter which he  
called Metalogues and defines as follows: -

“A Metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject. This  
conversation should be such that not only do the participants discuss  
the problem but the structure of the conversation as a whole is also  
relevant to the same subject..."

In this vein Marc Garrett and I are currently working on an ongoing  
project with called DIWOlogue. We are devising a series of  
collaborative, networked live performances using Furtherfield.org's  
and others' artware, using free and open source software to edit and  
manipulate media files. We are documenting the process in a  
(Wordpress) blog here http://diwologue.net/blog.
If anyone would like to recommend any interesting spaces for real- 
time online art performance I'd be really pleased to hear about  
them: )))

Enuff!

Cheers
Ruth

http://furtherfield.org
http://http.uk.net
http://visitorsstudio.org
http://diwologue.net