A political party has been set up in Sweden that plans to participate to the upcoming national elections. Piratpartiet plans to remove all immaterial rights, including copyrights and patents and also hopes to stop Sweden's participation in international copyright organizations, including WIPO and WTO and to make it illegal to put any restrictions on distribution of digital content.

"Pirate Party" also aims to push even further the privacy laws and to make it illegal to track or monitor citizens' communications online and offline.

To register an official party in Sweden, they need to get 1,500 signatures to support its cause. The organization managed to gather over 4,000 signatures in first 24 hours and is in process of validating the signatures.

The party says that it is against seeing the developing world starve because the developed world refuses to share its intellectual property.

Via El Navegante, the Inquirer and Afterdawn.

Istanbul based photographer Mike Mike is working on an open source web based project called the Face of Tomorrow. His idea is that if you could make a composite of all the faces in a city right now you would be looking at the Face of Tomorrow.

In each city, he takes 100 photos of people in one specific location, divide them into male and female and from these makes a composite face to create a prototypical citizen of a place at a moment in time or at some point in the future when notions of race and individuality are less important (let's hope so, Mike!)

As the Face of Tomorrow is an open source project, anyone can send in 100 photos for Mike to composite the face of that city or place.

Each night of the RNC, Screensavers and the Thing will present the RNC Redux Open Doc Tour, a real time performance created by pulling a broad selection of the day's blog text, photos, audio, and video to mix it into a narrative of the day's events. This live, collective documentary will be generated through a gestalt remix of rich 'personal is public' content.

There are going to be thousands of people textblogging, audioblogging, videoblogging, photoblogging the RNC, most with RSS feeds and most with open content licensing.

Screensavers will use keyworx, a multi-user cross media synthesizer, to generate, synthesize and process images, sounds and text within a shared realtime environment. Then, this RNC Remix Open Doc will be projected on the streets each night from August 29 till September 2 at various locations.

The audience will be encouraged to add their stories to the mix using SMS, AOL instant messenger, webcams, etc. At the same time, the “tour feed” will be streamed to the web. Screensavers also plans to extend the collaboration with simultaneous keyworx sessions in other locations in the US and abroad including Bowling Green Ohio and Amsterdam.

From Eyebeam < del.icio.us/tag/art

To cover the voices of people on the street during the Republican National Convention, and let you directly plug in, the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition and the Indymedia Network have build their own newsroom: everyday, they produce a newspaper, a television show, a radio webstream and a website with up-to-the-minute reports, videos and photographs about the RNC.

To help showcase this work, the Gigantic Art Space has offered these independent journalists their gallery. From August 19 through RNC, the Independent Media Infoshop at GAS/gigantic artspace will serve as an Independent Media Infoshop for a public hungry for truth.

Another organization, the August Sound Coalition, lets you record your "straight up grassroots communication" during the RNC. They want to be a welcoming and supportive structure that sound artists, radio groups, and activists of all skill levels can plug into during the RNC.

If you have photos or text, become a moporter with MOPORT, a free service to make and share mobile phone reports.

For more news and links to other local initiatives, see Newsgrist's imvoting blog.

Via Glowlab.
Related entry: Mobile reporters and other activists at the RNC.

MyPostie, a touchscreen kiosk allowing older people to communicate electronically, is being tested at a retirement village in Australia.

The kiosk does not have a keyboard or mouse, just a touchscreen, flatbed scanner and printer. It relies on a virtual private network.

People write a letter, swipe their ID card and scan their handwritten letter on the kiosk , and it is then delivered as web mail. They can in turn receive emails from family and friends, and have them printed out.

A brilliant idea as most residents of retirement villages do not use computers, but their children and grandchildren do.

From Australian IT, via The Raw Feed.

Artists Against 419 (AA419) has carried out a 48-hour online protest against advanced fee fraud, aka the 419 scam.

The protest is an organised version of the SlashDot effect – whereby a huge number of visitors turn up at a site, overwhelming its bandwidth allocation. The virtual flash mob began at midnight on 1 August and has already taken down three of its targets.

The organisers hope to shut down 4 fake lottery web sites in less than 48 hours and make web hosting companies, the authorities and the media more aware of the problem of the Nigerian 419 fraud, its lottery variant and other criminal fake websites.

The site calls on Netizens to visit the fake sites and repeatedly download all their images. As a result, the site holders lose money and the ISP hosting the site shuts it down.

Artists Against 419 does not only advocate attacking the fake bank sites. It also recommends that readers report the fraudulent activity to relevant authorities.

The next flash mob (the 9th) is planned on September 1st.

From The Register.