[wos] post-openness

[tt at cut3.com]

hi all,

sorry, an other quite long mail. i want to make clear why wos should care
about drawing a crowd, how the target group would looks like, and what
implications this could have for program planning.


> > if you really want a crowd, then concentrate on
> > user-generated content. because that's where the crowd is at.

> 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?

maybe this is not a difficult question to answer in the context of a wos
conference. we only want a full auditorium, not everyone that contributes to
the net.
our target is the occasional wikipedia editors, the video activists that
wonder about "podsave" music, or just a student that has a an unsettled
aversion against to much commerce in creative processes. they get attracted
and find a whole new world. most will have difficulties to follow the
conference as a whole. but some will stick to the topics, understand, and
tell others. i think there are a few good examples for this process in
berlin.
the conference is also a good tool to educate journalists, the outcome may
occur month and years later.

so i really see a big chance here, to get concepts to an audience much
bigger than the actual auditorium. i believe this because, many of the
concepts discussed at a wos conference have meaning for peoples lives. they
just do not know about them, never reflected about them. the just feel for
example, that the current copyright regime is some strange trick directed
against them, where you can do nothing but cheat. that things could go an
other way, is good news at least to some of them.
so we should not ignore the chance to use wos as a vehicle to spread the
message, to bring people in contact with a multitude of working projects and
original thoughts and concepts, not filtered by mass media. we should not
choose the ivory tower.

all we need to achieve this, is to get some attention before the conference
starts, an aura of being the place where al the eggheads are, where the
future will be examined, for sure helps. and we need to communicate in a way
that people get an impression, that they can follow things. (that’s where
“free” and “open” come in, we need this hazy but well established terms to
tell a big, epic narration in simple terms.) 
an important thing here is also to gather all the different communities. a
wikipedian may find out that he likes soldering, and will start a free laser
network community. a programmer and "stallmanian" may find out that the
whole picture is bigger and more complex.

and i think we have to have this things in mind on a program planning level.
for sure important task is to compile a program that is relevant and sexy
for insider.
but we also have to be inclusive. and this is not only about tutorials, but
about presenting a program, a list of panel titles and descriptions, that is
attractive to people near by, but not quite there. having a bigger audience
in mind may sometimes even help to focus on the real question.

here some practical examples what this could mean:

we do not need to invite a flikr/yahoo executive or that alike.
but why not invite someone that can attract the berlin (or german) bodcast
scene. this community will experience a lot of problems other projects may
have solutions for.

+++ so a would like to see for examble markus beckedahl to prepare and host
a panel with the working title “ sane solutions for podcasters”. (i think
they work on an podcast linux distro at “new thinking”)

+++ the already suggested netlabel panel, but please in a manner that is
“open” in the sense of inviting and enlightening in the spirit of the wos.
why not let the makers of “burn station” host it?

+++ i also would like to invite bloggers explicitly. maybe the price of
openness (if you don’t operate a "mediawiki"), the challenge from spam and
other destructive behaviour maybe an interesting angel for such a panel. (is
it?)

+++ wikimedia is in my opinion a must, even everybody knows about already.
institutionalisation of am massive multi-user project, maybe something here,
that could get interesting for others in the future. and what happened to
jimmy wales list of “ten things that will be free” one year later?

+++ i would like to see the swedish pirates of piratpyran talk about their
concept of the “grey commons” <http://piratbyran.org/?view=articles&id=107> 
their views may not be very sophisticated, but they give filesharing (and
that means quite a lot of people) a vioce, and also fight for the right to
build upon copyrighted material, exactly the challenge janko wrote about.
this challenge may not be new, but has interesting aspects as a massively
adopted habit, as people explore new way to get creative.
and it would just be fun to see piratpyran fight us copyright reformists.

+++ i would really like to see a panel that cuts in to the world of unfree
platforms. this would, in my opinion, be a good response to the web 2.0
hype. and again, talking about platforms that people use and know about
could help building bridges. 
a good argumentation in a dialog about what is lost in an unfree
environment, could be more helpful than a lot of tutorials. 
as already mentioned i think a good solution here, could be, to look on some
relevant survivors of the nineties. 
what problems are related to the task of porting existing collaboratively
generated content to free licences? did projects think about it, or did they
just not care, because things went well anyway? do projects that did not
change feel competition from projects that did? how to commercialisation
processes of open-minded projects occur? what implications has it, say, to
include google ads, to pay for bandwidth?
one field that may be interesting here is translation services. what are the
relations between <http://de.wiktionary.org> and <http://dict.leo.org/>?and
how does my favourite hindi forum at <http://pauker.at/pauker/de/hi/fo/102>
fit into the picture?

+++ “who to get free content on the street” is another panel i would like to
see. not so much only, to present the projects of for example
<www.platoniq.net/>, <http://www.egoboobits.net/> and others from around the
world (brasilia?), but let them talk about goals and experiences. enable
networking and watch the outcome, so to say. 


i hope this is enough to draw the picture. and i hope there is enough space
left for the scientific part of the conference ;-).
just to more proposals, and thanks for your attention that far.

+++from here from vienna i would like to invite someone from
netznetz.net/mana. the city of vienna decided, that the subvention for
net/media art of 250.000,- euro per year should be allocated by the artists
themselves, employing online procedures. a long and painful process started.
netbase lost its financial base at the same time. but it’s a fascinating
experiment, partly a forced community, and it could give the term “open
money” a new meaning.

+++ and last but not least i would like to see armin’s ‘sober and
self-critical’ panel on free infrastructure, that carefully analyses what is
feasible and what is not. where projects start and where they lead to? where
has the free wireless community for example failed, and what wonderful
things emerged there?

ng thomas