Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons - CCI International Conference

Conference program and Panel Sessions (final) schedule
Requirements for presenters
General information for visitors to Brisbane (PDF)
Venue and travel information
CCI media backgrounder
Peer-reviewed conference papers

See also the Creating Creative Brains Baroness Greenfield public lecture (Wednesday 25 June)

OVERVIEW

This conference showcases some of the CCI's own research projects, and features papers from academic, business, creative or public policy specialists on many aspects of value-creation in the context of creative industries and innovation.

CCI is Australia's premier centre for research into the convergence of cultural and economic values. It specializes in research that explores enterprise and innovation along the dynamic boundary between market and non-market, cultural and economic, commercial and community. It is especially interested in the
development of both digital and community-based social network markets.

CCI has a strong interdisciplinary commitment, both disciplinary (linking research in creative innovation and digital media with law, education, business and IT) and applied (linking creative practitioners with business leaders, policymakers and scholars).

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Download this list as a PDF

Henry Jenkins
“The 21st century McLuhan” (Howard Rheingold), Henry Jenkins is an international authority on the cultural implications of technological convergence, the digital economy and user-generated creativity. He is the DeFlorz Professor of Humanities and founding director of the Comparative Media Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Author of Convergence Culture, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture and many other books. See his blog at www.henryjenkins.org/

Mark Deuze
Advocate for citizen journalism and public communication, and theorist of creative and cultural labour. Mark Deuze is Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Associate Professor at Indiana University, USA.

Norman Jackson
Leader in the development of creative approaches to curriculum reform in the UK. Chief Editor of Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum (Routledge 2006). Professor and Director of the Surrey University Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education, and Head of the UK Higher Education Academy

Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield
Leading scholar in nanoscience and neuroscience who brings a compelling perspective on the future of work and identity. Pioneering scientist, entrepreneur, communicator of science and policy adviser; the first woman to lead the prestigious Royal Society of Great Britain; Senior Research Fellow, Lincoln College, Oxford and Honorary Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford

Margaret Simons
Freelance journalist and author of The Content Makers - Understanding the Future of the Australian Media, Penguin 2007, and Faith, Money and Power - What the Religious Revival Means for Politics, Pluto 2007.

Camilla Cooke
Freelance consultant who worked with the digital agency New Dialogue on the ALP 2007 federal election online campaign www.kevin07.com.au

Richard Allen
Leads Cisco's policy work on advanced technologies in the EU and also supports policy work in the Nordic region. He recently stepped down from his seat in the U.K. Parliament where he was IT spokesman for the Liberal Democrat party and an active Member of Parliament (MP) since 1997, working on ICT policy issues.

Stuart Cunningham
Director of the ARC of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. This centre draws on contributions across the humanities, creative arts and social sciences to help build a more dynamic and inclusive innovation system in Australia. He is currently President of the Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS). He is the author or editor of several books and major reports for national and international agencies. His essay, What Price a Creative Economy? was published in 2006 by Currency House.

John Hartley
ARC Federation Fellow and research director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. He is author of 18 books, translated into a dozen languages, and over 100 articles on creative industries, popular culture, media and journalism, including Television Truths (2008) and Creative Industries (ed., 2005). He is editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Brian Fitzgerald
Internationally recognised Intellectual Property (IP) and technology lawyer. He was a QUT Medallist in Law and studied at Oxford and Harvard Law Schools. At Harvard Law School in the mid 1990s he became involved in the new field of Cyber or Internet Law and has since pioneered the teaching and research of this area of law in Australia.

Erica McWilliam
One of Australia’s most outstanding pedagogical scholars, Erica is internationally recognised for contribution to education reform, with a particular focus on workforce preparation of youth in post-compulsory schooling and in higher education. In her new book Today’s Kids, Tomorrow’s Creatives, Erica argues that to enter the creative workforce, young people don’t just need more education and training, they need a different sort of education and training that takes account of the increasingly important role of creativity in innovation-led economies.

CONFERENCE THEMES

We are planning six broad strands of themed content at the conference. These are not separate mini-conferences; programming will be designed to cross-fertilise approaches and interrupt disciplinary comforts. Papers are solicited for all strands.

Cultural Science

Convened by John Hartley (research director of CCI and leader of its Citizen-consumer program.

A long term trend can be observed in which disciplines formerly located in the humanities have drifted ever more firmly into the sciences: biology, geography, economics and psychology to name a few. Meanwhile, the sciences are becoming ever more confident about explaining culture, for instance using neuroscience, game theory, complexity theory and evolutionary theory. Does it follow that humanities-based disciplines are of declining utility? What can they offer to the study of creative innovation, cultural and economic values, and the growth of knowledge? This part of the conference will consider interdisciplinary approaches to cultural and economic value, and the prospects for a unified field that integrates (and interrogates) humanities, sciences and mathematical/ computational approaches.

Topics might include:
• scientific method in the study of culture (and vice versa)
• cultural studies and complexity theory and disciplinary disruption
• the ethnography of dynamic change
• closed expert systems and open adaptive networks
• causal connections among agents (e.g. producers and consumers) in economic and cultural systems
• multiple games
• evolution of knowledge
• computational methods
• micro and macro levels of analysis
• social networks and digital technologies

Creative Capital and Workforce Futures

Convened by Erica McWilliam (leader of CCI creative workforce program)

This strand explores creative capital as a knowledge object that is producing shifts in social and cultural dispositions to work, and concomitant shifts in the education and training of workers. Creative capital has been described as the human ingenuity and high level problem-solving skill that leads to fresh opportunities, ideas, products and modes of social engagement. It has been lauded by Richard Florida and others as the key asset of the 21st century workplace. Rather than pre-emptively endorsing or dismissing this viewpoint, the strand will re-interrogate creative capital in terms of:

• The relation between creative labour and intellectual property
• Employability and the end of ‘career’
• Formal education – its importance and irrelevance
• Creativity and the role of critique

Legal Issues for Social Networks and Creating Public Value

Convened by Brian Fitzgerald (leader of the CCI Legal frameworks program)

This stream will consider legal issues arising from the use of new social network platforms by government, industry and the general community. It will also highlight legal issues faced by social network participants in creating public value through blogs and citizen journalism.

Topics might include:
• Creative Commons
• Tensions between IP rights (e.g. DRM) and open source, content sharing
• Creating public value
• Social network law
• Creative industries and the law – property, labour, rights, consumer-created content
• Regulation: impediments and pathways to market

Citizen Journalism: Diversifying Information? Democratising Conversation?

Convened by Terry Flew (leader of ARC-funded citizen journalism Linkage project)

The rise of Web 2.0 technologies has been associated with a proliferation of forms of online news and information provision that have gone under the general title of “citizen journalism.” Citizen journalism exists across the spectrum of media from specialist blogs and collaborative news sites, to independent online media. Australian examples include Crikey, On Line Opinion and New Matilda, and the greatly expanded Web presence and participatory opportunities enabled via established public sector and commercial media organisations. This strand will pose questions such as:

• How is citizen journalism associated with transformations in how news is produced and consumed?
• What is the relationship between new media forms and the established media?
• How are media organisations reinventing themselves in an age of Web 2.0?
• What are the conditions for citizen journalism to be sustainable over time?
• What are the implications for journalism as a professional and occupational practice?
• Are these new forms of news enhancing citizen participation in democratic societies?

Broadband innovations and the creative economy

Convened by Julian Thomas (leader of CCI international [global and regional] program)

This stream focuses on the question of what people will do with the broadband public network that has been nominated as a major priority for the new national government in Australia. What new connections can be made between the previously distinct fields of communications, media and cultural policy? Who will provide the new content and services for broadband, and how will that content be managed?

Contributions in this stream will focus on areas including:
• user-generated content and professional content providers
• international models for broadband content and services
• the role of public cultural and educational institutions
• the social dynamics of broadband content
• the future of community media and the role of the community sector
• broadband policy at state and local levels
• new policy frameworks for broadband media

Creative Industry development agendas: design as value-add

Convened by Stuart Cunningham (Director of CCI and leader of its Innovation Policy Program)

Ten years on from the first development of the notion of creative industries in the UK, there are now many examples of creative industries development, support and facilitation strategies in many countries. This strand will seek to overview policies and programs in an international and national context with an emphasis on evaluation of successes and failures. It will also focus on design as a key enabling sector. A majority of firms within the design sector sell their services, do not manufacture and most do not export, and most of the activities that involve the craft of design are also conducted by designers ‘embedded’ in other sectors of the economy that are not normally thought of as associated with the Creative Industries. Design is an archetypal ‘leverage’ creative industry: while it does not generate high employment or have a massive industry turnover in itself, it is increasingly valuable in what it enables other industries to achieve.

• What has been demonstrated to be the optimum mix of policies for the creative industries? What has worked and what hasn’t?
• What is the relationship between the predominant supply-side industry development strategies compared to demand-led strategies?
• What is international best practice in creative Industry development agendas?