Beer and pedagogy
28-July-2005
permalinkBBC NEWS | Technology | 'Free' Danish beer makes a splash:
Shortened version of article on the BBC web site. I love it. The students have made something useful and have published it. Great pedagogy, great learning, great outcomes!
"Students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen" have released "what they are calling the world's first open source beer recipe.
Rasmus Nielsen, who runs a Copenhagen-based artist collective called Superflex, wanted to challenge the idea of 'proprietary' beer.
Mr Nielsen asked his students to think about applying open source ideas to the non-digital world.
"Why not take those ideas back to the old world, and try to apply them to other things as well?" asks Nielsen.
Why beer? As the Vores Oel website says, why not?
"It's a universal commodity that we like to think of as free, but unfortunately it isn't," says Mr Nielsen. "So, I thought it was an appropriate medium to confront these issues."
The students also created a label for the beer, and a website that comes complete with catchy, open source music and sound effects.
Most important, the students released the recipe under what is called a Creative Commons licence.
"You're free to change it," says Mr Nielsen. "But if you use our recipe as the basis for your beer, you have to be open with your recipe as well. That's the legal framework that follows the beer."
You can even sell your own version, as long as you credit Our Beer for the recipe.
The tipple has proved a hit. The Our Beer website has been a busy place, says Mr Nielsen.
"We got loads of questions from small beer brewers in Mexico, Brazil, and even Afghanistan," he says. "Afghanistan, that was weird."
One smaller Danish brewer is even planning on brewing up some of Our Beer to sell in the autumn.
Both Mr Nielsen and his students hope that what people take away from the Our Beer project is that open source is not just for the digital world.
Mr Nielsen says there is no reason that developing countries could not use the idea to manufacture, for example, their own HIV/AIDS drugs."
