User:Jon Ippolito/Sandbox

Still Water is a research and development laboratory at the New Media Department of the University of Maine that studies and builds networks for artists, academics, and other creative professions. Still Water examines networking from technical, social, and political angles; specific areas of interest include online collaboration, indigenous sharing protocols, and limits placed on artistic remixes and filesharing by intellectual property law.

Digital tools
Still Water has released social software intended to foster collaborative creation, distribution, and preservation of common culture. ThoughtMesh and The Pool are meant to connect digital scholars and creators, and have been described as incubators for artists and students that may serve as a means of evaluating academics working in new media.

Still Water is also the current development team for the Variable Media Questionnaire, a tool that tracks strategies for preserving ephemeral artworks and has been proposed as a means of resurrecting obsolescent artistic and scientific media. Still Water also helped create the Cross-Cultural Partnership, a legal instrument meant to encourage ethical behavior across cultural divides, as when electronic musicians want to sample Native American chants or when Wabanaki elders and permaculture activists live and work together in Still Water's LongGreenHouse project.

Public events
Public events that Still Water has produced on these themes include the Code and Creativity conferences (2003-present) and Connected Knowledge conferences (2006-present). In 2004, Still Water co-organized the event Distributed Creativity with Eyebeam Atelier, which merged conversations during a six-week period from the email discussion lists Creative Commons (USA), Rhizome.org (USA), DATA (Ireland), Sarai (India), and Fibreculture (Australia).

Fellows and staff
Still Water research fellows include Mi'kmaq clan mother Miigam'agan and Wampanoag elder gkisedtanamoogk, and permaculture gardener and engineer Julia and Charles Yelton. The staff includes co-founders Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito and senior researchers John P. Bell and Craig Dietrich.