[wos] wos4 is happening, help wanted

[Saul Albert]

On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 05:49:28PM +0100, Volker Grassmuck wrote:
> The following dates are available:
> 
> 7.-9. September
> 14.-16. September
 
Hi Volker, congrats, all on getting wos 4 hosted! :)

14-16th Sept seems good to me. Refugees from AE can find succour and gear
up for a geek out at eurooscon.

> Finally, the most interesting question: what will the issues of wos4 
> be? Some topics have emerged already: licenses (GPL v3.0, CC), Brazil 
> the Open Source Nation, the Treaty on Access to Knowledge, Wikimedia, 
> and netlabels are some of them. Soon we'll put a first sketch up for 
> discussion. Also, this time we really want to get a call for papers 
> out. 
> 
> Also here we would very much like to invite you to join us in 
> identifying crucial issues from free software, free content and free 
> infrastructure to be disussed at wos4. 

When Cven from the c-base posted the good news about WOS happening to the
WSFII.org discuss list, I suggested that it might be a really good
opportunity to bring back together some of the people and discussions
that you joined there as part of the 'infrastructure' component already
mentioned.

These sub-categories from WSFII were, as ever, unable to describe the
diversity and complexity of what people were actually doing.

- Open Geodata
- Free Networks
- Open Money 
- Open Civic Information
- Open Hardware
- Free/Open Culture

But they did synthesise in lots of interesting ways - and could do again,
perhaps remixed or glommed together in new ways.
 
Having talked to some of the c-basers people who are currently in London,
and seeing the freifunk people continue to do amazing things setting up
free mesh networking infrastructures, the question I'm dying to see
asked, and answered in Berlin (which seems to be the European Capital of
Free Infrastructures :) is 'Now we have a Free Infrastructure, what are
we going to do with it?' 

I'm not sure that's a 'crucial issue' - more of a question that could be
answered in lots of ways - practical and discursive... or both. If I was
looking for 'hot topics', I'd say 'hybrid economic models' and 'geodata'.

There seems to be a general shift towards deployment of hybrid economic
models that are becoming commercially successful (at least gaining VC
capital)

'fon' (en.fon.com) - in the field of free networks has pilotted a hybrid
economic model, using free software, hardware, rhetoric, and ideas from
the Free Networks community. They got 18 million $ from skype and google.
Some aspects of what they're doing kind of make sense, but what kind of
model is this?

del.icio.us and flickr, (recently prominent) and countless other foaf
mapping and collaboration experiments coming from the free/social
software scene bought off and consolidated as prototypes for 'web 2.0'.

Where 2.0: O'Reilly's other big conference this year announces: "The
thrust of the program for the 2006 conference will answer the question
"where's the value"? They'll be looking at the latest Where 2.0
technology, businesses, and content with an emphasis on these questions:
How can developers make money at this? What applications have legs? How
can enterprises make money using this?"

The best reaction I saw to the O'Reilly announcement, on the #geo chan on
irc.oftc.net was:

20:55 <@zool> that's a good question
20:55 <@zool> WHERE IS MY VALUE
20:55 <@zool> i seem to have misplaced it

'Where's the value' *is* a good question, especially when trying to
ascertain whether these hybrid models are any different from the usual
ram-raid on our subculture.

Since the European Parliament adopted the 'Inspire' directive giving the
green light to continued and consolidated corporate monopoly on
state-collected geodata (due to pass into law in July 2006, unless people
rally around http://publicgeodata.org successfully) - this is definitely
a key 'issue' that could be addressed - and might be answered best by
asking 'if we had it, what would we do with it?'.

So - a bunch of questions.

Anyway, back to dates:

The WSFII calendar looks like this:

- 24-27. March 2006         :   CommunityWeekend, Berlin
- March 31.-April 2. 2006   :   2nd National Community wifi Summit, USA
- end April - start May 2006:   WSFII Dharamsala, India 
- 1-2. Nov. 2006            :   WSFII Goa, India
- mid-end Nov. 2006         :   WSFII 2006 Bangalore, India
- 15-16. Dec. 2006          :   WSFII Kerala, India

There's a nice, WOS shaped gap in there - it would be really great to add
it to the calendar as a place that WSFII people and discussions could
reconvene in Berlin (European Capital of Free Infrastructures 2006) to
discuss winter meetings in India and contribute to infrastructures
debates at wos...

Hope I can make it, and that this braindump is in some way useful.

Cheers,

Saul.

-- 
-- http://chinabone.lth.bclub.org.uk/~saul/