Making large volunteer-driven projects sustainable. Lessons learned from Drupal by Dries Buytaert, original creator and project lead of Drupal :: May 29, 2012; 12:30 pm :: Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor, Cambridge, MA (RSVP required) + webcast live.

In this talk, Dries shares his experiences on how he grew the Drupal community from just one person to over 800,000 members over the past 10 years. Today, the Drupal community is one of the largest and most active Open Source projects in the world, powering 1 out of 50 websites in the world. The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Volunteer networks and communities exist in many shapes and sizes. Continue reading

Please support this inspiring and important project! Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) is a line of mesh networked electronic clothing with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to function, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence. The project is focused on creating networks of communication to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of color and other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis. The Autonets garments, when activated, will alert everyone in range of the the local mesh network who is wearing another autonet garment that someone needs help and will indicate that person’s direction and distance. More here.

Listen to KPFK’s interview with Micha Cárdenas:

ReLocate: Community Engagement and Solidarity :: Kivalina and Shishmaref, Alaska - Call For Civic Media Artist — Deadline: May 28, 2012. Continue reading

Meta Cyber Arts Web Ring :: Call For Submissions — Deadline: April 18, 2012 :: Contact Faith Holland faholland [at] gmail.com.

I am looking for artists whose work looks critically at any issues surrounding the internet. These works need not be net art, but they must be available online in order to participate. This work could fall under the rubric of ‘post-internet’ art or ‘internet-aware’ art, but this project leaves that kind of terminology to be self-defined by the artist and does not itself assume those labels.

Web Rings were popular in the early days of the consumer internet. Continue reading

Embroidered Digital Commons Workshops with Ele Carpenter and Emilie Giles :: Saturdays, March 3 - April 28, 2012 (excluding April 7); 10:00 - 12:00 pm :: Furtherfield Gallery, McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park, London. Continue reading

The International Award for Participatory Art is world-wide the first award promoting and supporting artists who involve their audiences in the process of producing works of art.

The relation between artist and audience has been at the heart of the research of artists for more than a century. Over the last decades there have been innumerous experimentations and a variety of critical approaches regarding the questions of authorship, the levels of involvement of the audience in production and  in decision processes. Often these researches take the form of temporary interventions rather than objects meant to last in time. Aiming beyond the strategies of the art market, to find funding for this kind of projects is challenging. Continue reading

After a 10 month hiatus the SoundTransit project is back, hosted by Turbulence.org.

SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. Phonography is the art of recording sounds from the environment around us, with an emphasis on the unintentional sounds which often go unnoticed in our daily lives. An international community of phonographers collect and share their recordings, with interests ranging from recordings of natural or urban environments to improvised situations or soundwalks, to the resonance of solid objects or the Earth’s atmosphere. Continue reading

Mapping Community Arts: Subversion, Repressive Tolerance and Pastoral Power by Pascal Gielen — organized and moderated by Hakan Topal with a response by Alex Villar :: November 8, 2011; 6:30 pm :: Art in General, 79 Walker Street, New York, NY.

In recent years there has been increased attention to so-called ‘socially engaged art practices’. Equipped with a sense of urgency and intent, artists and curators develop work with the support of communities or groups to tackle political and social issues. While the success of these projects are not easily measurable, they often reiterate the role of artist/ curator as protagonists of specific forms of social change, which posits a direct contrast to recent activism which carefully distances itself from any leader-based political organizational categories. Continue reading

Riverscaping/Alles Am Fluss is an international and northeastern US public realm public art/design-build competition on the Connecticut River in Massachusetts :: Deadline: December 10, 2011.

The objective of this competition is to uncover new public realm art, architectural and environmental approaches to riverscapes at two scales: regional and intimate. Each designer/artist/team will produce an overall strategy for connecting and relating the four defined sites (and those between) while paying attention to the unique and individual characteristics of each community through site specific work. At its core, the competition asks three main questions of its designers/artists/teams: Continue reading

Mutualisms :: September 9 - September 25, 2011 :: Opening: September 9; 6:00 - 10:00 pm :: Symposium: September 11; 1:00 - 5:00 pm :: Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219-21 South Morgan Street, 60608, Chicago, IL.

Mutualisms is a collaborative curatorial project organized by Lise Haller Baggesen and Kirsten Leenaars, exploring the ways in which networks of friendship and artistic collaboration can be used as a model for curating. Mutualisms is looking into artistic strategies for finding hospitality and exchange in the context of contemporary art practices as well our own social domain.

Eight Dutch and eight American artists/artist duos were paired and worked together to create a collaborative presentation of their works. Continue reading