Joi Ito's Web

Just arrived in Japan after a visit to Chicago, Dubai and Singpore - three major hub cities. It was interesting to contrast them. Obviously, Chicago isn't a hub in the same way as Dubai and Singapore are hubs, but there are similarities.

My apartment in Dubai still isn't ready. It's starting to feel a bit like home, especially thanks to all of my friends there, but I'm sure I'll feel a lot more settled in when I have a my own space and all of my "stuff" moved in. Planning to spend more time there when it cools down again in the fall. ;-)

Uploaded my photos to Flickr and Picasa but going to try using Fotopedia widgets to post them here.

One of the groups in the Royal Film Commission Online Media workshop worked on a video of the workshop itself. There will be a more lengthy and hopefully Arabic subtitled version of the workshop going online after some editing by the RFC. This video is a student-made video which describes the workshop and the various groups and their projects.

Some participants in the RFC Online Media Creativity Workshop

I've been in Jordan since Sunday and enjoying myself a great deal. I arrived just in time to participate in the last day of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East session at the Dead Sea. I was able to talk to some of the management of the World Economic Forum about Creative Commons and thanked them personally for making their photographs available under a CC-BY-SA license on Flickr.

I gave a talk at the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship for the Entrepreneurs Week program. Thanks to Princess Sumaya and the team at the QRCE for making it a lot of fun and exposing me to some energetic entrepreneurs.

The main purpose of my trip is to run a workshop, with the help of my trusty regional CC rep Donatella, organized by the Royal Film Commission held at the SAE Institute Amman with addition help from the Jordanian Media Institute in selecting participants. This is the result of discussions with Princess Rym, who chairs the RFC and the JMI, and her team during my last trip to Amman.

Although we're still on day three of a 5 day workshop, I want to thank everyone at the RFC especially Mais who has been amazing. Also, thanks to the SAE for the state-of-the-art space and the super-helpful tech guys helping us sort things out. Most importantly, I want to thank all of the students who signed up and apologize to those who weren't able to get in. We had limited space and had to turn down most of the people who applied. We had applications from throughout the region and it was a really hard job making the selections.

I'm really happy with the group that we currently have for the workshop. We have an enormous amount of background, cultural and age diversity and it's really great seeing everyone working together full of energy and creativity. I'm also glad that this is turning into a peer to peer workshop with everyone pitching in to teach and help and I'm definitely learning as much as I'm teaching.

We're all heads down working on our projects and trying to get as much done as we can during this brief period, but you can watch our rather unedited progress on the blog we have set up. We're also twittering and you can follow the conversation at the #rfconlinemedia tag. Hopefully we'll continue some of the work even after the workshop is over.

Finally, I want to thank Donatella (and Mika) for all of their hard work pulling this crazy schedule together.

I still have four more days here so I'll try to write a wrap-up post later.