The interactive mediaspace offers a new way of understanding civilisation itself, and a new set of good reasons for engaging with civic reality more fully in the face of what are often perceived (or taught) to be the many risks and compromises associated with cooperative behavior. Sadly, thanks to the proliferation of traditional top-down media and propaganda, both marketers and politicians have succeeded in their efforts to turn neighbour against neighbour, city against city, and nation against nation. While such strategies sell more products, earn more votes and inspire a sense of exclusive salvation (we can't share, participate, or heaven forbid collaborate with people whom we've been taught not to trust) they imperil what is left of civil society.

Douglas Rushkoff, 2003
Open Source Democracy: How Online Communication is Changing Offline Politics from Project Gutenberg.

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. The repository provides video clips from a variety of sources, especially video programs obtained from U.S. government agencies such as the U.S. Records and Archives Administration and NASA. The Open Video Project is at the Interaction Design Laboratory at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Groklaw is an open source legal research project maintained by Pamela Jones, a paralegal who tracks the SCO vs. IBM litigation. The site investigates SCO's litigations against IBM and Linux and provides legal research and which helps to clear the cloud of misinformation and confusion surrounding the case. The site contains commentary and links to all relevant court and SEC filings.

Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain -- or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. Their aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier. To this end, they have also developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way, hoping that the ease of use fostered by machine-readable licenses will further reduce barriers to creativity.

The members of the Etree.org community are united by a belief among its members that music that bands permit to be traded should be freely traded. The biggest difference between Etree.org and other online music sites is that Etree.org deals exclusively with legally tradeable music. They only deal with live recordings by artists that allow taping and/or free trading of their performances. The list of TradeFriendly bands grows daily. Trading music by artists who don't permit it could shut etree.org down faster than you can say Napster. For that reason, and more importantly out of respect to those who create the music, they prohibit people from using this community to exchange music unless the artist gives permission to do so. The community was formed as an offshoot of two highly regarded online trading communities: [Sugarmegs Audio] and [People for a Clearer Phish]. Starting with 10 people, etree.org has enjoyed ever-increasing growth and popularity. As of early 2004, there were over 12,000 users and almost 300 independently-operated file (FTP) servers.

Hyperwar is a collection of material related to the (primarily military) history of the Second World War, completely cross-referenced via hypertext links and enhanced, where appropriate, by various multi-media computer technologies, such as sound, movies, Java applets, etc. The material presents a U.S.-oriented perspective, have originally evolved out of U.S. Government documents. Over the years the site has increasingly incorporated user contributions and perspective to give it a sense of shared history.

The North Carolina Independent Media Center (NC-IMC) is an non-corporate, anti-authoritarian network of activists that are committed to using media and journalism as a tool for promoting egalitarian change. Though based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in the United States, the NC-IMC covers all related issues within North Carolina that are not being given adequate coverage by any other media. The North Carolina Independent Media Center will also work to network with existing independent media and publications that are committed to social and economic change throughout North Carolina. The North Carolina Indymedia Center advocates and promotes media democracy through free skill-share workshops and teach-ins, which are to be open for the benefit of all. Along with web publishing, they also produce print resources and videos to spread the message among those who may not have access to on-line resources.