[wos] post-openness

[Armin Medosch]

Volker and all

I would like to make a more positive contribution but first you need to 
remind me about the goals and direction of WOS4. I thought that 
with the change of venue there was a) no more reason to do anything 
related with theatre, b) less pressure on having big audience 
numbers. Please correct me if i am wrong. 

Is WOS4 going for a big audience? And if yes, what sort of people 
should that be? As we know, there is not _the_ public anymore, 
there are fragmented groups. which publics is wos4 targetting? What 
is the focus of the conference? Does it have declared socio-politico-
artistic goals, like trying to have an impact on debates and 
directions? Or is it more a (re)presentation of a cross-selection of 
current debates in the 'open' field? Is the goal to make good 
propaganda, advertise the many good causes to people not yet 
aware of them? Or is the goal of the conference more theoretic, a 
clarification of concepts and terms? 

Maybe this is all clear for you but for me it is not. 

The format of the conference can make a big difference. For me the 
Sarai conference in Delhi more than a year ago worked, with a single 
track conference in a smaller room for about 200 - 250 people in 
daytime and public lectures by well known key-note speakers in the 
evening attended by 1000 people and more. NOt that the same 
concept should be copied but thinking abput format is important. 

Maybe there could be an inside track which is more reflexive, 
theoretic, and a track aimed at attracking larger crowds with well 
known names, not in parallel of course but sequentially. 

To explain my posting from yesterday a bit more: of course some of 
the topic in Saul's list are still important and should somehow 
feature, but the question is how. I think that free networks, for 
example, should definitely be one of the topics for a panel or more. 
What we tried at wos3 in 2004 was a revision of what had been going 
on in the area of free networks since the early days of, say, the 
consume manifesto, and the popularisation of the idea, a reality 
check we called it. but the reality check never happened, instead we 
got that star trek guy who was drowning on about 40 Gigabyte 
networks where you can render reality in real-time. Meanwhile even 
more happened in that area. OpenWrt and distros built using it make 
a big impact, such as the freifunk distro. funkfeuer has a slightly 
different way of doings things in vienna and is also flourishing. OLSR 
is an important factor in that. But the technology as such is not what 
we should put in the foreground, it is the way of doing things, the 
ways of working, the social methods of nourishing participation, etc. 
maybe that could be a focus. Other things to be considered are 
projects such as OpenEmbedded and the  whole area of customizing 
small devices, Oleg's firmware, Hivewares, etc. 

But despite the excitement about such projects the reality is that 
technically there is not much in the way of building larger scale 
wireless community networks and yet still they remain relatively 
small. Technically there exists wonderful free software for internet 
telephony but 99 percent of people are using skype. I think the 
commercialization of ideas coming from a 'free' context is an issue, 
in that regard i agree with Saul. It is the story of the internet as such 
and maybe this is _the_ story of the last 10 years and worth a 
rehash. First there was the new economy bubble and now we have 
web 2.0. the forces of appropriation are not asleep and google, it 
seems, is the master of that game. so why not have a more 
combative tone in that regard. let's scare people into coming to wos4 
 - well, maybe not such a good idea - but a sort of tooth grinding 
realism rather than more promises about nice things open and free. 

Maybe a problem is that we are sort of part of a net culture from the 
nineties and the world has not really followed us. I think Janko 
summed that up quite well. and i guess that the overall political 
situation contributes to that. since 2000 the world has become a 
considerably more insecure place. people worry about being blown to 
pieces by fundamentalists, dying in a pandemic, loosing their job or 
never getting one, being silenced by their governments despite a 
theoretic right to freedom of speech, etc., etc. In many ways power 
has consolidated itself in a way i have not experienced it in my life 
before. sometimes free software and the culture of the internet are  
positioned as if they could remedy all that (not by WOS, i need to 
add). People don't give a fuss because they know it is not going to 
be the case. Net culture is not the sole or priviliged angle from which 
to discuss the more pressing problems of the world. It could make an 
important contribution but that potential is always hampered 
somehow. so, why? this i meant yesterday by saying that we should 
make the compexities of issues productive, as questions, and not 
put ourselves on a soap-box evangelizing about the holly trinity of 
free software, free hardware and free networks.  

this email has already become much longer than I intended it to be. 
sorry for that. but in the coming two weeks I wont have much email 
time because of node.london. nevertheless, at last, some more 
propositions. my personal background is in a weird overlap between 
free media as a political question and media and net art. Therefore I 
am still and will always be interested in issues about art, technology  
and politics. I suggest that in this regard, instead of glorifying the 
technology, we should put the creative developer at centre stage. 
With creative developer I refer to free software developers who create 
applications and platforms for free media and art, people such as 
jaromil, ramiro cosentino and the r23.cc network, miller puckett who 
inveneted pure data and a few more (please help me thinking, maybe 
even the processing guys; i dont like their aesthetics but they have a 
followership, like all those students). those people should not be 
presented as technicians or engineers but should be asked to 
vocalize their social and political concerns, their motivations. As 
Thomas suggests, there should be tried a way of integrating the 
presentations of tech-developments, platforms, applications, with an 
exploration of the ideas and socio-politico-artistic implications. some 
creative developers are well able of formulating that themselves 
without needing a media theorist. and in any case, a more integrated 
approach should be tried. as an illustration of the point there could be 
some wild wireless art/tech crossover again, involving c-base, live 
streams sessions with theora, pure data, etc. 

hope those thoughts find some resonance
later
armin
ps: i also don't think net labels are that interesting a topic


On 19 Mar 06, at 16:15, Volker Grassmuck wrote:

> >From this thread and the one we had last summer on the "yes / sorry, 
> we're open" subtitle proposal, I'd say the terms "open" and "free" 
> are too fundamental and important to simply avoid them because 
> they've become overused or fuzzy in meaning. I'd agree with Thomas 
> that they are, well, not really simple, as the discussion shows, but 
> they do have an intuitive appeal that we can utilize. But then, being 
> at least in parts an academic conference, we should also make an 
> effort in clarifying the definition of the freedom and openness that 
> we mean. 
> 
> Here's an ad hoc idea:
> 
> "Free" refers to rights, either granted by law or by a license or 
> where there are no contrary rights (e.g. public domain). The freedom 
> to use, to redistribute, to modify, to fork etc.
> 
> "Open" refers to a state of a piece of information, a social or a 
> technical system that allows to connect to it. Open Access allows me 
> to read an article, connect it to my own thinking, reference and 
> quote it. An open community invites new people in. Open hardware is 
> fully documented so I can write my own driver. Open sourcecode might 
> come with only the freedom to look at it (MS's Shared Source).
> 
> There is a finite list of freedoms (especially if we restrict 
> ourselves to the informational realm, so leaving aside the freedom of 
> mobility etc.), but there is a continous range of openness.
> 
> Freedom and openness are interlinked. Everything that grants a 
> mimimal set of freedoms is also open in that sense (Open Access). The 
> reverse is not true: Accessible APIs might make a system open but not 
> necessarily free. Even more so with open data formats that might get 
> wrapped in DRM.
> 
> On 18 Mar 2006 at 10:50, Janko Roettgers wrote:
> 
> > This of course challenges old-school
> > thinking about openness. Why would I need the source code of Flickr
> > or Del.icio.us if I can access every function of their services
> > through their API?  
> 
> Good question. Is the technology behind Flickr so elaborate, that it 
> would be difficult to do it again in free software? If everybody is 
> using Flickr because everybody is using Flickr, would a free foto 
> repository be able to reach critical mass? What's bad or dangerous 
> about Flickr so that we would need a free version?
> 
> Open APIs might be an inroad for liberating an unfree system:
> 
> On 18 Mar 2006 at 21:46, Erik Moeller wrote:
> 
> > I think I see potential for an interesting panel here. Appropriation of
> > proprietary platforms by user subcultures vs. free platforms. 
> 
> That was also Janko's point
> 
> Saul's point was exactly the opposite: community structures being 
> appropriated, like CDDB etc., the usual pattern. So yes, if we find 
> enough powerful examples of interesting interactions with open but 
> unfree systems, that'd be great.
> 
> > Perhaps of interest in this context is a little project of mine to
> > select the best Creative Commons (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) material from
> > Flickr and upload it to Wikimedia Commons:
> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:FlickrLickr
> > 
> > So far we've reviewed over 50,000 images and uploaded nearly 5,000 to
> > Wikimedia. In a way, we're forking a subset of Flickr (sans most of the
> > cat photos) -- and keeping Flickr honest in the process.
> 
> That's a pretty cool example. Are there others, maybe outside the 
> Wikimedia space? BTW, it also shows that an "open" API is not enough, 
> the "freedom" granted by the licens is what makes the difference 
> here.
>  
> On 18 Mar 2006 at 10:50, Janko Roettgers wrote:
> 
> > Now one can argue that Myspace and Youtube are not open and that
> > Wikimedia content is somehow more valuable than Flickr content, because
> > Flickr users choose the "wrong" type of licese and - god forbid - upload
> > infringing content. But obviously it doesn't matter to them. They take over
> > closed platforms and appropriate them for their own good.
> 
> Are people who upload the pics of last Saturday's party and share it 
> with a closed group of friends or even with the world not just using 
> Flickr in its intended way? In how far are the appropirating it? 
> [oops, curious typo, I'll leave it ,-)]
> 
> I'm not sure if you're right about 90 per cent not caring about 
> freedom (in the above sense). Of course, there are very few people 
> who care about licenses for their own sake. On Wikipedia, at least 
> when you start contributing, it's pretty hard not to notice the 
> information on copyrights and FDL. With Erik's example it becomes 
> evident that licensing conditions have significant consequences. 
> 
> > If you really want a crowd, then concentrate on
> > user-generated content. Because that's where the crowd is at. 
> 
> In principal: absolutely. That's why we have things like Wikimedia, 
> Free Maps & Geodata, Citizens Journalism and the DV Camcorder 
> Revolution on the wishlist. Just two question marks: 
> 
> "user-generated content" reminds me of "consumer-created content 
> (C3)" as used in DRM circles (e.g. Rosenblatt). It implies that 
> content, by default, is produced by the content industry, and if 
> users or worse: consumers, start creating it, that's something 
> remarkable (and causes problems and opportunities for DRMs). That 
> should be the other way around: people create works as a default, 
> industry-created content is a special sub-set of that. Googling for 
> the term shows a lot of talk about amateurs doing something that 
> professionals might turn into something interesting for advertizers. 
> Since we are talking about basic vocabulary, I wonder if we can find 
> a better term for this phenomenon?
> 
> Then about crowd-drawing: If you're right and 90% just do it without 
> caring about the how and why, then why would they come to a 
> conference where people talk about it rather than do it? If there is 
> no or less of a community around Flickr than around Wikipedia, then 
> would people using it go to listen to its founder?
> 
> Don't get me wrong. I do think mass-creativity and collaboration 
> should be featured prominently at wos4, I'm just not convinced that 
> the huge wave we're seeing on the net will actually flood Columbia 
> Halle. 
> 
> > Youtube is a haven for
> > unlicensed stuff. TV clips, home videos with commercial music in the
> > background, weird remixes and appropriations are what makes this site
> > work. By doing that Youtube and it's users challenge the copyright
> > system in a way that is maybe even more profound than P2P. File sharing
> > was about exchanging other ppls content. Youtube and Co. are about
> > taking that content and building upon it. 
> 
> Another central point, I think. We have free-licensing of our own 
> works. That's easy in principle, even if messy when you look at the 
> details. Now it's about using other people's works. For 
> redistribution a global license / content flatrate model to my mind 
> is a pretty good approach, in principle while the details are even 
> messier. The final challenge is the freedom to modify other's works. 
> It's an obvious thing to do, given the powerful means of production 
> we have sitting on our desks. It happens on a massive scale. And I 
> don't see any solution in principle. Legally speaking, while the 
> flatrate repairs the harm to the economic interests of authors, their 
> moral rights (attribution, integrity) cannot be easily repaired. I 
> think, Lessig has been thinking about this since Free Culture, but I 
> don't know what solution he's driving at.
> 
> Volker
> 
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