[wos] brief report from WSFII, London

[Volker Grassmuck]

Dear all,

that was a very nice meeting last week. It all started from the free 
wireless networks scene and turned into a formidable little World 
Summit on all things related to free information infrastructures.
http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/

One purpose of the working meeting that started one week before the 
public symposium was to prepare for the Big Summit which was decided 
to take place in November 2006 in Vistar, a place close to Bangalore. 
Vistar is a community for material arts, organic agriculture, tribal 
cultures, the landless and other social movements. They have a campus 
of 5 sqkms and hosted the AsiaSource in June 2005. A date to mark in 
your calendars. There will be a number of regional meetings leading 
up to the Summit, one of them will be at the wos4. 

At the symposium, there were a number of highlights. In the Open 
Hardware section,  Karel Kulhavy from Prague received standing 
ovations for his Ronja project. It's a point-to-point optical data 
link based on IrDA red or infrared LEDs currently covering 1.4 km at 
10 Mbps full duplex. The design is under GPL and one transmitter 
costs 100$ and 70 hours to build. There are currently 102 registered 
installations in 50 countries. 
http://ronja.twibright.com/

I found the Open Maps session the most eye-opening. It was build 
around the recent O‘Reilly book "Mapping Hacks. Tips & Tools for 
Electronic Cartography" by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, Jo Walsh. The 
session, chaired by Jo, followed two approaches. One is Open Access 
to state-created geo-spatial data. As Chris Corbin who has been 
working on maps for 30 years pointed out, this should be greatly 
aided by the EU Public Sector Information Directive that came into 
foce in July 2005. In practice, there will still be issues of red 
tape, price, data formats etc. DIY is the other approach, i.e. free 
maps generated from user-contributed GPS surveys and annotation 
overlays. The projects presented include:
http://freemap.in/
http://www.free-map.org.uk/
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
http://www.mapbender.org/

Free mapping tools and infrastructure are also being developed, like
http://udig.refractions.net/ or
http://geoserver.sourceforge.net/

Considering the significance of digital cartography for location 
based services and all sorts of other things, and the fact that there 
is a small but strong global movement adhering to free software, free 
content ideas, I think we should feature it also at wos4.

I also had talks with Paula Le Dieu, Director of Creative Commons 
International, extending an invitation to the CC community to come 
together at the wos4 again. Simon and others from Mute were there, of 
course, and they too, announced their participation in wos4.

WSFII was followed by Future Wireless
http://www.cybersalon.org/ and the Open Congress
http://opencongress.omweb.org/
both of which looked fabulous but I didn't have the time to attend. 

These were more steps towards the freedom of mankind and towards wos4 
,-)

best
Volker


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