Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is Born!

Jono Bacon has announced the very first Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

For a long time now we have been shipping a package called example-content with each release of Ubuntu. This package provides a bunch of different pieces of content including audio, video, PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents and more. The idea is that you can use this content to kickstart your new Ubuntu system and see what it can do. example-content has been really useful, but it has been languishing a little recently, and then we had a rather interesting idea…

Why not use example-content as a great way to show off audio and video from free culture artists? It can give artists a platform of millions of Ubuntu users to show off their work and it really excites me because we are applying the Ubuntu ethos to free culture.

The idea is simple:

• Your submission must be either audio or video (we are not accepting documents/images) and no larger than 1MB for the audio and 3MB for the video. The submissions must be made available in either Ogg Vorbis (audio) or Ogg Theora (video). The submissions must be licensed as Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike.
• Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Do not email any of the organisers or judges with your submissions.
• Add your entry to one of the submission tables at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.
• When the deadline for submissions closes, our panel of judges (Cory Kontros, Luis de Bethencourt, Luke Yelavich, Lydia Pintscher and Tony Whitmore) will pick a shortlist, and the Community Council will then pick the final winners from the shortlist.

The deadline is 4th September 2008 and you can read more about it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.

This is a great opportunity for artists to get their work seen or heard. Lets make something cool happen. Good luck!