The Fabricatorz team continues their forward momentum this week. Among the notable activities, highlights include: pushing out new content, delivering passionate speeches, and assisting with Community announcements.

Leading off, founder and developer of Fabricatorz, Jon Phillips, is in Brasil this weekend, as a featured speaker at FISL. Topics covered in his Keynote range from the creation of a Federated Social Web, to components of such a web, like StatusNet (for whom Jon serves as Community Director).

In other Open Source news, work continues on the Open Font Library, spearheaded by member of Fabricatorz. A big announcement is expected in the very near future, regarding the status of OFLB.

Meanwhile, it’s sister site, The Open Clip Art Library, concluded it’s month-long Logo Design Contest, as a judging panel sifted through a staggering 240+ submissions to announce hank0071 as the winning designer (with the above entry). The Fabricatorz Team congratulates OCAL for an astonishing contest turnout!

Work continues on Open Clip Art Library’s next official Release. Users of the site who are eager to participate in the coming event are encouraged to submit sports-related clip art, tagging the new work with the key word “sports2010“.

Be sure to check in, next week, for updates on these and other goings on at Fabricatorz.com!

The Open Clip Art Library has spent much of 2010 actively pursuing higher ground and greater methods of user contribution, beginning with the March Release of Version 2.0. Since that landmark release, the OCAL team has been on a regular iteration schedule, geared toward simplifying the user experience and fixing bugs.

More recent openclipart.org releases have begun adding incentives for content creation, in the form of themed package releases. To date, said releases have resulted in a wide array of content that forms a spectrum of seasonal work.

For the next release, scheduled on August 2nd, the Librarians are changing things up a bit, by calling for Sports-themed content from the Community. These new works will be included in the coming release and featured, as the latest downloadable package. Artists wishing to step up to the plate and contribute their original works are encouraged to register (if not already a member) and upload the SVG(s), tagging them with the keyword “sports2010“. Deadline for user submissions is Sunday, August 1st.

Members of the Fabricatorz team are currently hard at work on improving The Open Clip Art Library in many ways, including contributing to this new Sports pack. Join us and help make Open Clip Art Library Version 2.4 a landmark Release!

This week’s Fabricatorz update is chalk-full of interviews, project iterations and conferences!

Getting things rolling, Christopher Adams will be speaking at the joint conference COSCUP/GNOME.Asia 2010, which takes place August 14-15. His topic will be “Elements of Typographic Freedom.”

Another Fabricatorz developer, Barry Threw, recently released StringPort, a one-of-a-kind computer interface for stringed instruments! StringPort arrived in response to the limitations many stringed performers find in MIDI programming and capturing compelling recordings.

In StatusNet land, Derek Derouin has been hard at work on the company’s own weekly StatusReport. Fabricatorz founder, Jon Phillips will be speaking, on behalf of StatusNet and free software, at FISL11 (Fórum Internacional Software Livre), which will be taking place this month (July 21-24) in Brazil.

This Sunday (July 18th) marks the Federated Social Web Summit, and Fabricatorz Florica and Jon have been working, in Portland, on representing new standards and agreed upon best-practices in web development.

Meanwhile, The Open Clip Art Library continues it’s evolution, following the recent release of Version 2.3. The FCRC Logo Design Contest deadline was pushed back an extra week (from July 9 to July 16) in order to accommodate for all of the incredible entries. Contest participants can expect an announcement of the winning design this Monday (July 19)! OCAL has also recently received recommendations from Luther College: Library and Information Services and @BobChao.

Jon has been all over the map this week, and is also featured in a Q & A at the Libre Graphics Meeting, defining the gathering and it’s personal relevance. Another interview, curtesy of the Meeting, is documented on a recent rejon.org post.

Solid work across the board from the Fabricatorz team. We’ll continue bringing updates on these and future projects as the weekly reports continue!

It’s been another busy week at Fabricatorz and here are just some of the latest goings-on:

LGM follow-up and updates

• Fabricatorz donated the rest to push the Libre Graphics Meeting pledge drive over the top (by $1!)
• As noted in many places, our great friend Kaveh has uploaded all the videos from LGM2010 Conference – you can find them all online here.
• Nicu, the original designer of the rejon avatar, wrote a nice post about LGM2010, you can read here.
• Inkscape is about to release 0.48! Please help out by testing it!
• The Open Font Library submitted an app for the Creative Commons Catalyst grant! Go Dave and crew!

Open Clip Art Library updates

• Submit your logo to the Open Clip Art Library by the 9th! There are already loads in!!! See here for contest rules and details.
• This week there was also a nice Open Clip Art Library reference in an article on making storyboards for film.
• Finally, thank you to all who helped mention the Free Culture Research Contest!

Qi Hardware updates

• Wolfgang gave a talk about Qi Hardware at Campus Party.
• Sebastien launched a nice demo of the MilkyMistOne working with a visualizer
• Harald Welte is making great progress on openbsc gprs/edge support
• There are plans for a German speaking open hardware event coming soon
• Here is a cool project to make a terminal for the Nanonote.
• Finally, here is a ning community for nanohacks (nanonote hacks)

The Open Clip Art Library enjoys yet another of it’s scheduled monthly updates, with revision 2.3. With over 32,000 vector graphics currently calling it home, OCAL has grown into one of the largest and most prevalent sources for freely available graphics on the web. Version 2.3 aims to begin building on this solid foundation, by increasing user interaction and content submissions.

The Spring 2010 Clip Art Package brought together a diverse group of artists and pointed them in a similar thematic direction. Over 11,900 individual downloads have proven the themed package format an effective way of presenting similarly-grouped work to the Community. As in the June Release, Open Clip Art 2.3 brings along with it, a compact, user-generated, themed package of clipart.

Familiar ground is tread, in the latest Themed Package Release, as Community artists, like laobc, rg1024, and pianoBrad have focused their attentions on the Summer Season. Any wishing to utilize this smoldering collection can do so individually (by searching for the key term or tag “summer2010″) or by downloading the entire package.

Also continuing this month is a logo design contest, initiated by the organizers of the Free Culture Research Conference. Artists still planning on submitting an entry should mark this Friday (July 9th) as the deadline for that submission. Three more judges, Jonathan Zittrain, Leonhard Dobusch, and Michelle Thorne, have been added to the esteemed panel that will judge and announce the winner on July 11.

For more information on all things related to this Summer 2010 Release, have a look at the official press release.

Fabricatorz Developer, Brad Phillips, has been hard at work on fresh takes of the group’s unique avatar designs. The latest creations, for Bassel Safadi and Helena Wang, have evolved from and expanded on their predecessors. Particularly, in Helena’s case, a realistic vibe is beginning to pervade.

These designs represent the possibilities of a Fabricatorz design contract. If you’d like a sparkling new avatar, we’re excited to work with you!

The Fabricatorz team has been busy churning out projects. Because day by day so much goes on in the Fabricatorz studio, we realized we should share more with our public! So from now on, we will be giving regular weekly updates from the Fabricatorz studio on all our goings-on and the progress of our projects.

We begin this week with a re-cap of the LGM conference which was a great success this year and well attended! Here are some highlights from the conference, in the words of LGM attendee Barry Threw:

“Some of the most interesting things at the meeting were the sessions on desktop publishing. People self publishing and developing sophisticated tools made it clear that contrary to some opinions about the directions of literary technology, new tools will only strengthen the printmaking community, not wipe it out with dedicated e-readers. The sheer ingenuity of projects solving publishing issues with freely accessible tools showed a steady movement that will with time inevitably destroy even the highest volume censored app store in the world. Excellent presentations were given on open font design by Christopher Adams (the publisher of Joi Ito’s book Freesouls) and on self publishing by Ana Carvalho at Plana Press on transitioning from closed source software to created independent comic books. Also Tom Lechner’s talk on his program Laidout shows off its many impressive features, including laying out print on an arbitrary polygon.”

(And if you are interested in reading more about the conference or thinking of participating in the future, check out more details about the event at hypermodern’s blog.)

On the Status.Net front – we have implemented a new desktop client:

“With StatusNet Desktop, anyone can connect to multiple StatusNet sites, including secure and private installations. It is simple to post new notices and replies, and view public, user, friends, replies, tag and group timelines. StatusNet Desktop lets you directly manage your user and group subscriptions, manage your inbox of direct messages, search for notices across all timelines and have an auto-refreshed timeline with new status updates.”

If you are interested in learning more, please read here for more information.

Finally we would love to plug a project of a dear friend of ours who has made a clever comic called Bear and Fox. Bear and Fox needs to raise some funds to get printed so please take a moment to look at the Kickstarter page and give your support! Thanks so much!

As reported in a previous post, Chicago film critic, Roger Ebert, has been at the center of a debate he revived in April. In said article, Ebert reaffirmed his stance that “Video games can never be art.”

A verbal onslaught from the gaming community, of greater than 4,000 responses, found it’s way to Ebert’s controversial entry. After months of fallout, Ebert has addressed his own critics in a shiny new blog post.

For greater analysis of this rebuttal, check out a new post by Fabricatorz developer, Brad Phillips!

As announced at the StatusNet blog, on Sunday, July 18th, Status.Net, Google Buzz, Diaspora, GNU Social, DiSo, BuddyPress, Dreamwidth, Onesocialweb, and others will be meeting in Portland Oregon for a Federated Social Web Summit, a one-day summit by those implementors working on building the federated social web. This means building upon open web protocols that allow for various web projects to interoperate. We will be addressing current implementations, successes and incompatibilities between services, as well as the future and how to implement it.

This conference will be around the same time as the Community Leadership Summit in Portland as well as OSCON.

To find out more details see here.

The “Free Culture” Movement, instantiated in a 2004 publication by Creative Commons founding member Lawrence Lessig, is a reaction to content ownership in a digital age. Because The Open Clip Art Library is, at it’s core, a platform to freely share and collaborate created content, it will be forever intertwined with the Movement.

The Free Culture Research Conference was born of a need from academics, in various disciplines, to analyze and discuss the implications of the Free Culture Movement.

The FCRC Organizers are seeking to establish an identity for these annual Conferences, and they are asking for the help of the Open Clip Art Community!

From now, until the submission deadline of 11:59p on July 9th, The Open Clip Art Library will be accepting user-created and remixed entries, as a part of the Free Culture Research Conference Logo Design Contest.

The winning design will be announced on July 11th (Sunday). For further details and examples, please read the Open Clip Art Announcement Page, as well as the press release.