Net Neutrality is a *big* topic which will be addressed more in a primer post next week but in the meantime, check out this interview by Nicole Scott with Kris Krug on bnetTV.com. Kris offers some savvy suggestions about how to "frame" the conversation about net neutrality by emphasizing digital human rights in Canada with a suite of progressive policies towards access, privacy and competition.

Vancouver writer Jonathon Narvey interviewed Raincity's CEO, Robert Scales and President Kris Krug, and chatted with some of the Raincity Studios crew, for an article in Business in Vancouver magazine.

He discussed the Raincity Shanghai office including the work/lifestyle, communication processes, team building across oceans and technical challenges and advantages of working with a very multi-cultural team.

Having attended open source software and blogger symposiums in Beijing and Shanghai, Krug has seen China’s Web 2.0 dynamism up close. With a team of 13 employees in Shanghai, mostly open-source online publishing software developers, and their CEO Robert Scales, Raincity now has an established beachhead in the country.

The article also explored the size of the Internet market in China and the rise of open source software and inpact on innovation.

“Web 2.0 is exploding in China,” said Raincity Studios president Kris Krug. “The Chinese are totally wired, totally online, using web phones and all the mobile technology we use here.

“There’s a growing middle class wanting to use all these open-source tools, in part because that means they don’t have to worry about using proprietary software and pay licensing fees to western companies.”

He also dug deep into the personal expression issues around the Beijing Olympics - a topic we've discussed a lot recently in the China, Social Media, Olympics, etc. series and Scales' article at Now Public.

“Last time I was in Shanghai, the Chinese government announced they had just hired 100,000 new cyber-police,” Krug said. “That’s on top of however many they had to begin with.”

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Krug has also learned how easy it can be to run afoul of vigilant Chinese cyber-regulators.

“We were running a bar camp (an informal Web 2.0 drupal tutorial seminar), and our wiki was totally open. Anyone could register and write on it.

“Within a couple of days, we received a letter [stating] that we had to change our site in accordance with the rules in China. Users had to be pre-approved, content had to be moderated and we had to make changes on the website. We scrambled to make the changes in 24 hours.”

Continuing the dialog about China, The Olympics, Social Media and Everything ... here's a response to one of Dr. Andy Miah's questions for the 9th International Symposium on Olympic Studies:

"In what way are new media platforms enabling new forms of journalism to surround the Beijing Olympics?"

To craft well-rounded answers, Symposium participant Kris Krug (Robert Scales is also on board) sat round the table with Richard Eriksson (recently returned from Shanghai and currently stay-cationing), and myself, to tease out the issues which influence the answers.

In our chat, we reviewed each of Dr. Miah's questions and tried to "twist the kaleidescope" a bit to reflect a broader world view in the conversational answers.

Here's what we came up with in response to: "In what way are new media platforms enabling new forms of journalism to surround the Beijing Olympics?"

I've mentioned some pre-Olympic and Olympic Games related activities coming up in passing. Now, as topics are piling up and the Beijing Summer Games are nearing (complete with controversy), henceforth begins a blog mini-series called, "China, The Olympics, Social Media, Symposiums, etc." - I think I'll need a better name for the series though. Suggestions are welcome.

Background

As you likely know, Raincity Studios actively conducts business in China with an office in Shanghai and the Raincity Studios site is published in English and Mandarin (French underway) and we collaborate with Chinese colleagues and some of us (not me) study Mandarin language and foodery. Just so ya know where we're coming from.