#Freesouls Weekly (004)

The Toy and Action Figure Museum. From Giant Midwest Mecca of Nerditude in Oklahoma Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Beginning today, we’re releasing all Wired.com staff-produced photos under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC) license and making them available in high-res format on a newly launched public Flickr stream. To mark our new licensing policy, we’ve compiled this gallery of 50 great pictures from our past stories. Take them, share them, remix them -- they're yours.

The Creative Commons turns 10 years old next year, and the simple idea of releasing content with “some rights reserved” has revolutionized online sharing and fueled a thriving remix culture. Like many other sites across the web, we’ve benefited from CC-licensed photos at Wired.com for years — thank you, sharers! It seems only fitting, and long overdue, to start sharing ourselves.

When you make use of any of the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, you are expected to abide by its terms of use. These terms of use provide you with practical and legal terms of reference. The original version is in English but we do know that for many in our communities English is not a language that will convey any message.

Over the course of a 14-day visit to Egypt, Jordan and Qatar, the Wikimedia team connected with local experts, university staff, student groups, and attendees at an Arabic Wikipedia Convening in Doha which was co-hosted by WMF together with the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The convening focused on ways to catalyze high quality growth of the Arabic Wikipedia across the Middle East and North Africa.

Global unique visitors for September: 455 million (+7.5% compared with August; +%14.2 compared with the previous year).
Revenue: $3,580,474
Total Expenses: $5,379,428
Total surplus/(loss): ($1,798,954)

photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

Hayat Sindi sees a gap. The youth of her native country, Saudi Arabia, are very well-educated, with $40 billion invested in education and training in 2011 alone. But they are lacking opportunities. In fact, 43% of Saudi Arabian youth between the ages of 20-24 are unemployed and 70% want to leave the country* – some dire stats when looking at the future of Saudi Arabia and the morale of its youth.

TED Talks Charlie Todd causes bizarre, hilarious, and unexpected public scenes: Seventy synchronized dancers in storefront windows, "ghostbusters" running through the New York Public Library, and the annual no-pants subway ride. At TEDxBloomington he shows how his group, Improv Everywhere, uses these scenes to bring people together.

When Howard Abrams, a software engineer in Beaverton, Ore., wanted to teach his daughter, now 10, and son, now 8, how to program computers, he thought of the fun he had playing with Logo, the first programming language he learned.

He quickly discovered that “Logo is pretty old school. Now there are a lot of different options.”

So he chose to teach his children Scratch, a language developed for teaching at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, both for its simplicity and the way it encourages collaboration.

It was late in the night, when Ahmed Awadalla, who works in the field of human rights, health, sexuality and gender posted a tweet.At the time, he wasn't sure whether revealing her identity was a good or bad move, however he wanted to know people's reactions to the news.

A military court today decided to jail blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah for another 15 days, 15 days after first detaining him, pending investigations on what defenders say are trumped up charges. Blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad's trial was also once again postponed until November 27, 2011.

Abd El Fattah was detained on October 30, after refusing to be interrogated by the Military Prosecution, in protest against its legitimacy. His arrest, and the international outcry it has caused, is shedding light on the plight of more than 12,000 civilians, including Sanad, who have been put on military trials in Egypt since the the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took power.

From TEDxSantaCruz.

TEDxBaghdad’s organizer, Yahay Alabdeli, an Iraqi refugee who lives in Amsterdam, told the audience that the theme of the event was “making the impossible possible,” and to “expose Iraqi talents and creativity for the world to know.”

Video responses to the TEDxYouthDay 2011 question: What can you share with the world? Learn more: tedxyouthday.ted.com

Cynthia Adkins is the Organizer of TEDxSouthLakeUnionWomen, a TEDx event hosted around the livestream of TEDxWomen that takes place in Seattle, Washington on December 1st.

Is this your first TEDx event?

Yes, and I am very excited about it.

Why did you sign up to host a TEDxWomen event?

It was a unique treat to attend TEDWomen in December 2010 — two full days surrounded by amazing, talented and inspirational women, with thoughtful and thought-provoking messages, ideas, and conversations. I am thrilled to bring the passion, spirit and energy that is TEDxWomen to the Seattle metro area.

Creative Commons began providing licenses for the open sharing of content only a decade ago. Now more than 400 million CC-licensed works are available on the Internet, from music and photos, to research findings and entire college courses. Creative Commons created the legal and technical infrastructure that allows effective sharing of knowledge, art and data by individuals, organizations and governments. More importantly, millions of creators took advantage of that infrastructure to share work that enriches the global commons for all humanity.

The Power of Open collects the stories of those creators. Some are like ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news organization that uses CC while partnering with the world’s largest media companies. Others like nomadic filmmaker Vincent Moon use CC licensing as an essential element of a lifestyle of openness in pursuit of creativity. The breadth of uses is as great as the creativity of the individuals and organizations choosing to open their content, art and ideas to the rest of the world.

Bethesda, Md. — Impact, not ideology, was the watchword at the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference, held here on Wednesday and Thursday at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The 260 high-level researchers, fund providers, and open-access advocates who attended didn’t waste time bashing publishers who keep research behind paywalls. (Some commercial publishers, including Elsevier, attended.) Instead they focused on the benefits of putting research—in the humanities and social sciences as well as in the sciences—quickly and freely into the hands of scholars, students, innovators, and the general public.

Last week, Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter led an education policy briefing at U.S. Department of Education headquarters that put a spotlight on the department’s support for open educational resources (OER). Joined by two of her senior policy advisors long associated with the OER movement, Hal Plotkin (journalist and former president of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District board) and Joel Thierstein (former executive director of the OER organization, Connexions), as well as by the director of the department’s Office of Educational Technology, Karen Cator, Kanter spoke at length about the importance the department places on the continued development of OER.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Great CC projects over at @kickstarter

One of my students at the Center for Civic Media and I were discussing the need for more conference venues for young speakers to share their ideas and polish their presentation skills. While TEDx has greatly expanded speaking opportunities, we felt that there was still more room to experiment with novel formats and extend the TED brand.

Today, we are announcing the OAuth 2.0 Playground, which simplifies experimentation with the OAuth 2.0 protocol and APIs that use the protocol. Trying out some requests in the OAuth 2.0 playground can help you understand how the protocol functions and make life easier when the time comes to use OAuth in your own code.

You have the so called social layer, people interacting more informally, in this case supported by Google+. I feel many people don’t truly understand how important the informal interaction layer actually is. It helps the people to become a group, or a team. This is crucial in social learning process to start to happen.

Creating Circles of specific people, like your learning group or class, helps you easily post topics that may interest just them, or ask for help from those in your team. In a way these are very simple things, but psychologically, very important. It shifts the learning and the responsibility more to the learners, perfects their collaboration and stimulates their creativity when they are working together.

Firefox 8.0 was just announced for download and one of the biggest changes that users will notice is that Twitter search has been added to the default search options in the top of the browser. Answers.com and CreativeCommons are out (ouch) and Twitter is in. The implementation is nothing special, it just drops users off on Twitter's own search page, but for the hundreds of millions of people in the world who don't know how to navigate to Facebook other than to search for it in their browser search bar - those people will now be one step closer to seeing what Twitter can do.

Thousands of people have donated money to pay a massive tax bill served on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

By Monday, there had been donations totalling more than 5m yuan ($790,000; £490,000) to pay off the $2.4m in taxes and fines the authorities say he owes.

Many people believe he was served the bill because of his outspoken criticism of the government rather than because he had evaded taxes.

Google+ has now allowed companies, organizations, and the like to create pages and the deluge of advertising has started...

Please make it stop! Is there any way to get through this without being smothered in advertising?

Finally, Google is now allowing businesses, brands and any non-human entity to participate in its Google+ social network, through new Google+ Pages that are launching today, promised to be available to everyone shortly.

INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Upload a portrait. Receive a poster. Paste it for the world to see.