September 19, 2005
OPENSTUDIO
The Creative Economy is Launched
At the AIGA National Design Conference held in Boston this week, the PLW announced our new OPENSTUDIO project. OPENSTUDIO is a system we've been working on for three years now that combines "creativity, collaboration, and capitalism" in an experimental online art exchange system. Our goals are to provide simple, extensible, creative tools for free in an open, web-based environment.
Underlying OPENSTUDIO is a currency system we call the "Burak" (named after the trustworthy Burak himself) that pervades our model of online exchange. If you like a piece created in OPENSTUDIO by a friend, you can buy it with Buraks. You can sell your own as well. What are ownership models of purely digital art? This is one of the important questions we hope to experiment with in OPENSTUDIO. And if people make a few Buraks in the process, that can't be all that bad ...
As of 2AM on September 16, 2005 OPENSTUDIO had its first gasp of air and appears to look like it will make its first step forward next month. Burak, Annie, Kate, Brent, Martini, Amber, Kelly, Isha, Connie, Mariana, and Nikki seeded the AIGA conference on Friday with specially marked cards given out to visitors with "100 Burak" credits for when OPENSTUDIO becomes online to a limited audience. A total of 20,000 Buraks seed the core of the first test of OPENSTUDIO and we are curious how these Buraks will flow within the system. I have 97.20 Buraks myself, how many do you have? [blogged by John Maeda on Simplicity]
Posted by jo at September 19, 2005 12:58 PM
