SA Rocks

OpenSA! launches in Johannesburg today with a pilot project to make South African heritage more accessible for remixing and re-publishing by online creators. In collaboration with SA Rocks and the African Commons Project, OpenSA! is collecting, tagging and managing donations from people who are willing to make their material freely available online. OpenSA! will also be helping to coordinate outreach to South Africa’s young creators to enable them to learn more about how to find open content that they are free to remix and share.

As access to the Internet grows in South Africa, so too does the range of creative activity by a new generation of active online citizens. Internet publishing in the form of blogging and citizen journalism, online publishing of photographic, video and music publishing are all part of a wide range of democratic speech that we as a young nation are trying to encourage and nurture.

There are some moments in the history and culture of South Africa that are part of our shared heritage – such as Nelson Mandela’s speech when he was released from prison in 1990 or Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech. For the first time in history we have the means to make those moments available to more than just the professional journalists, filmmakers and researchers who were traditionally authorized to re-publish them.

OpenSA! is a pilot project dedicated to the growing number of young South Africans who are finding their voice online. The project was started in order to nurture this creativity by making it easier for young creators to find and share media about our heritage safely and legally.

Gregor Rohrig appears to be one of the first to contribute to OpenSA!. This is a great move for us as Gregor’s photography is some of the best that I’ve seen of South Africa and its people.

One of the main concepts around this project is the public domain. To find out a bit more info about public domain, what it is and what it means check out the blog post on iHeritage.co.za.

For additional information, please contact Heather Ford
Phone: 011 327 3155 or 082 872 7374

Email: heather@africancommons.org

The African Commons Project is a non-profit organization based in Johannesburg with the goal of mobilizing communities through active participation in collaborative technology (www.africancommons.org).

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This post was originally published at gregorrohrig.com. Gregor is an absolutely incredible photographer who i have much respect for. His Miriam Makeba photographs are moving and incredibly relevant right now. Here is his post:

This morning I heard the sad news about the passing of Miriam Makeba, the Grammy Award-winning South African singer, also known as Mama Afrika. Makeba was the legendary voice of the African continent, who became a symbol of the fight against apartheid.

For a moment I stood still, starring at my phones’ screen feeling slightly shocked and overcome by sadness.

Miriam Makeba played a very important role in my life. I met her the first time in 2003, when she was singing on stage, on the sports grounds of Rhodes University, during my first photographic assignment. I was to document the event for the Student Newspapers, the Rhodes University magazine, and local press. It was also my first shoot with my brand new digital SLR – the Nikon D100, which was an unbelievable machine back then.

I was also one of the few who worked with a Digital SLR then, and especially in a small backward town like Grahamstown, this gave me the advantage of having the images on disc, distributed to my clients, and ready for print by the next morning.

It was from then onwards, that many assignments came flooding in, and it was that specific event that gave me the necessary self-confidence to work hard at what first was only a passionate hobby of mine.

I remember clearly, the evening Miriam Makeba sang, that the lighting was very bad, it was dark, and I struggled to take a decent picture. But I snapped and snapped and tried all kinds of functions, programs, and manual overrides to get a good image. And I remember the energy that came from Makeba, it was radiant, it was addictive, it was full of life, soul, and song – her stage presence was unbelievably powerful!

I time stamped these images to be published on my blog on Makeba’s birthday (March 4th), now only to be presented with her unfortunate passing.

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