apc.au

Commons based solutions build on and improve social relations and attitudes towards our environment, honouring local knowledge and community values towards the collective management and development of our resources.

It was 20 years ago today that the Association for Progressive Communications was founded.

Finding like minds online during the early days, as APC was forming, was a source of both inspiration and motivation. Those pioneering days were the result of a small hand-full of people, some who have remained within APC and others who remain close, as friends, but have moved on.

I first met APC colleagues face to face for the first time at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1992, Rio de Janerio. The generosity, enthusiasm and passion shared amongst ourselves often over-rode many other projects I had been involved with… and finding that many of these people had once been musicians, poets, intellectuals, journalists… creative people with a penchant for social justice that was unshakable.

Another personal APC milestone was sharing a preliminary report on the extent of computer networking in Asia (the first Pan Asia Report) to APC colleagues and members of the fledgling Internet Society at the Internet Society conference in Prague, 1994. It was ground-breaking research at the time, both in how it was conducted and what it revealed. APC, in the very early 1990’s, had more countries net-connected (through advocacy movements and organisations), than the Internet.

20 years on I am still involved with the APC, writing at this very moment from Quiet Mountain, Hekpoort, South Africa, at an APC Board meeting. It has been a privilege and an honour.

In 1999 we co-produced and began to host the excellent indigenous news service, Rengah Sarawak. In the intervening years we continued to support the project, more recently getting behind the open video and micro-docs series, Sarawak Gone.

Sarawak Gone is a micro-docs series dealing with two of some of the last forest communities of Sarawak, the Bidayuh and the Penan. Sarawak is one of two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo, north-west of Australia.

The series is being released online over the coming months. Two episodes are already online, another five in post-production.

The series and associated resources are licensed for re-use and re-distribution at no cost with the only condition being that the producers, Toy Satellite and Andrew Garton, are acknowledged at all times.

For more information about these micro-docs, or if you’re keen to watch them, head out to sarawakgone.cc.

In collaboration with EngageMedia, we are seeking to initiate a new open documents project that would seed policy and procedure templates for new and emergent organisations, associations and collectives.

Project outline

Every new organisation, no matter in which country they are incorporated, will undergo the process of developing a set of policies and standard operating procedures. It is a wheel that in general need not be re-invented.

EngageMedia is one such organisation. It wishes to learn from the efforts of others, to improve on them and share the results back to the NGO sector. However, in this instance, there are few resources, if any, of value to EngageMedia. In short, EngageMedia has yet to locate any organisation that shares their policies and procedures under an open and acceptable re-use license.

Thus, EngageMedia proposes to undertake the drafting and gradual publication of an open set of policy documents that can be retro-fitted to any similar organisation.

The Open Policies & Procedures Initiative (OPPI) would be an open documents project developed in much the same manner as any piece of open source software.

Scope for OPPI to assist small and emergent organisations without access to such resources, let alone the skills to draft such documents, is not only extensive, it is invaluable.

Interested?

If you’re interested in participating, contact Andrew Garton. We are particularly interested to work with organisations who have policies and procedures they are open to sharing from which we can build our templates base from.

On the 22nd of Sept 1998, at a former Smith St location in Collingwood, a warm evening saw the launch of Secession Records. Every day ought be celebrated… no less so 11 years of music making, performing and producing.

Visit http://secession-records.org/ and purchase one of our beautiful CDs.

apc.au is conducting a five day workshop in October to improve the production skills for online content, in particular video, at the Malaysian based, Star Online.

This will include an overview of production work-flows, tools and online distribution. The end result will see the production of five micro-documentaries utilising, where applicable, Creative Commons licensed content. The workshop is based on Andrew’s micro-docs – made with anything, any where, for everyone.

Andrew has been awarded a one year residency in the studio of late Australian painter, Clifton Pugh. This will see us establishing a short-term studio to complete work on Garton’s fusion cabaret, Tong Tana.

Tong Tana is largely inspired by our micro-docs series, Sarawak Gone, and the results of a collaboration with South African free-jazz trio, Benguela, and visualist Andrew Parker.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_Pugh
• http://agarton.org/tongtana/

Grant is working with a mate of his to produce Plane Crazy Down Under an aviation podcast that focuses on the Asia/Pacific area. Featuring discussions about recent news items, interviews with aviation personalities and special guests, the podcast is released under a Creative Commons Australia non-commercial by-attribution license and is available from the website, on iTunes and from other podcatcher websites.

Plane Crazy Down Under has a growing audience from around the world and is already providing opportunities to link apc.au’s online advisory knowledge with the aviation world, including Grant’s appearance on a Social Media Networks and Aviation panel held in conjunction with the Asia Pacific Aviation Outlook Summit 2009 conference in Sydney.

• http://www.planecrazydownunder.com

Grant has been working with World Aviation Experience (WAE), the owners of Flight Experience Melbourne (a 737 simulator in Melbourne that’s open to the public) to help develop their online presence.

After working with WAE to establish their online strategy as part of their overall marketing strategy, he has designed and built their “Experience This!” blog,set up their Twitter feed, trained their staff in using Twitter to build awareness and helped set up their FaceBook presence. His ongoing tasks include maintaining the blog and working with the company to help grow & develop their online presence.

• http://worldaviationexperience.com.au/blog/
• http://www.twitter.com/FlightExpQV

Our preference, given time and resources and sometimes not even that, is to make things. That’s why apc.au exists. It’s a structure that keeps us some what organised so that we can make the things that we are compelled to create.

For some years now Andrew has worked with a number of media makers in the production of live events from theatrical performances to large screen projections. In more recent years he has returned to the creation of video works himself.

Apart from the video and performance based installations he had created (e.g. NOTHINGKNOWN, TONG TANA, GRIT 01, 02 and 03), he has begun work on a series of micro-docs or short format documentaries. The first series, Sarawak Gone, will be launched 10 December 2009. For more information, follow Andrew on Twitter @freq_ghost.

It’s been near on two years since we re-traced our steps, down-scaled and re-emerged with our skills, intuitive knowledge and passion for a secure and fun future. With that in mind Grant and I have taken the bold step towards a strategic plan, drawing on our dreams and aspirations and 20 years in the IT and social media / computer communications business.

In the spirit of openness, we share with you the bare bones of our vision, mission and objectives… keeping in mind there is still much work to be done. But we are stoked with having come up with a description of what it is we do, where we came from, and amazingly, vision and mission statements in a single sitting!

• Draft apc.au Strategic Plan