This weekend, our friends at New York Law School and Yale ISP are hosting an important two-day unconference called Innovate/Activate.I/A brings together leading voices to examine how activists can spur social, political, environmental, scientific, technological and legal innovation. A number of OVA members are proud participants in the event, which is taking place the week before the Open Video Conference on September 24-25th.Intellectual property regimes seek to provide incentives for innovation… but often they often don’t work as designed. Legal and social hacks (like Creative Commons, or the GPL) have emerged from outside to supplement the existing IP regimes, often to great success. But where do we go from here? From the organizers:”While these approaches have been exceedingly important in bringing about needed change, many successful groups have devised strategies that balance the extent to which activists work within existing innovation systems in order to achieve their goals, as they continue to explore the necessity of circumventing those systems. At the same time, the increased production of and focus on IP in all industries has catalyzed the emergence of IP obstacles in areas where IP has traditionally not been a consideration, thus creating new areas for activism. It’s time to reexamine our approaches to improving global welfare by identifying new and existing IP-related challenges to activism, developing strategies for overcoming IP obstacles, and delivering practical solutions to spur social, political, environmental, scientific, technological and legal change.”Have a look at the confirmed participants, and if you’re interested head over to the registration page. Hope to see you there!

If you’re angling to visit New York this October 1-2 for OVC, but don’t have a place to stay, you may be in luck.We’re teaming up with the folks at Adopt A Hacker NYC to host out-of-town open video developers and other techies. AAH is an awesome community of ambassadors from the New York tech scene who offer their couches, in the spirit of openness, for visitors.If you’re a developer and coming from outside the NYC metro area, visit Adopt A Hacker and apply today! Tell them the Open Video Conference sent you. With luck, you may have a place to stay and a few new friends.If you’re not a developer, check out this awesome collaborative map by Elijah Lynn. It shows over 20 places to stay in the city, over varying price ranges, and where they are in relation to the conference venue at the Fashion Institute of Technology. If you have tips or know of additional places, please feel free to add to the map.

Adam Chodikoff, senior producer of The Daily Show, prefers the moniker of “investigative humorist.” He’s the guy who plumbs the archives to find juicy video clips of politicos, cable news talking heads, and other public figures contradicting and embarrassing themselves. And he’s a big part of why video is today’s medium of record—though he doesn’t write the gags for Jon Stewart, he brings the intangible genius that makes The Daily Show pop.

At this year’s Open Video Conference, he’ll talk about how he sources the awesome video montages for the show, and walk us through some of his favorite video picks.

Check out the Washington Post profile of Chodikoff for a fascinating look inside the process of the Daily Show. “He has this amazing memory for sound bites about anything policy-related,” says the show’s executive producer. “What’s remarkable is how many ideas he initiates because he remembered that this guy said this or that a year ago. He’s the show’s unsung hero.” In another profile, one of the show’s writers says that Chodikoff is “in the news matrix… He spots patterns, trends, the forces of history. He remembers a politician saying the opposite thing three years ago and gets us to that video.”

More than just the video mastermind, Chodikoff is “the vital link in the program’s comedic ecosystem.”

Register today to check out Adam and all the other awesome participants at Open Video Conference 2010!