by Jo Walsh

The World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures is a gathering of practitioners, who are also thinkers, in open source GIS, software and hardware, community FM radio and WiFi networking, open information/knowledge, open education,open money ...

Wsfii seeks to have permanent impact on the venues of our gatherings. Wsfii may, for instance, leave behind functioning connectivity between villages or institutions that will keep the network alive. Wsfii is being mentored at the Djursland Institute in Denmark, which is setting up a research and training institute in rural wireless networking.

The next major Wsfii gathering, in Bangalore in November 2006, will seek to bridge the gender, disability and North-South divide among the technology experts of the world. Wsfii also seeks to have positive impact on Mission 2007, a project to connect all of India's villages, as well as on grassroots NGOs in India. Wsfii is an attempt to illustrate, by demonstrating, a potentially new kind of technological whole which is greater than the sum of its parts; a technics that emphasises original and autonomous creation by humans, built on open standards, interfaces and tools.

In Volume 1 of his classic Technics and Civilisation, Lewis Mumford describes the "paleotechnic" era of early industrial capitalism, which preceded the "neotechnic" era of the Machine Age, which was brought about by the availability of standardised tools, open best practises and a reform-driven consideration by 'professional' technologists for obviating some of the clearly negative impacts of new technology on human life.

Trade secrets, sometimes important, sometimes merely childish empiricism, retarded the cooperative extension of knowledge which has been the basis of all our major technical advances; whilst the system of patent monopolies was used by astute business men to drive improvements out of the market, if they threatened to upset existing values, or to delay their introduction - as the automatic telephone was delayed - until the original rights to the patent had expired.... [The machine] produced during the paleotechnic era was the systematic negation of all its characteristics: nothing less than the empire of muddle. ... The new struggle was over the system itself. ... The new machines followed, not their own pattern, but the pattern laid out by previous economic and technical structures.

The Paleoinformation age is drawing to a close; Wsfii is an ongoing attempt to put together a picture of what a true Information Age can look like.
Each of Wsfii's activities is a kind of Architecture of Participation, an open Collaboration, an ongoing public description of the Process of Creation. The domains Wsfii has featured are those activities that have been very affected by open source software and the "Hacker Ethic" that underpins its creation. The domains this ethic can affect are innumerable. Every kind of research effort can be re-oriented, from protectionist bubbles formed by the pressure to Be First, towards a space into which we can all arrive together, by working on the things that we enjoy most, having the means to contribute to enhancing the things that we like, and getting together to talk about it.

There is no 'We' in Wsfii. Wsfii belongs to anyone who wants to tend to their part of it. Everyone is encouraged to create their own Wsfii out of their own intersection of interests. Wsfii, in being, can create more Wsfii, everywhere

At this point in history, 1952 A.D, our lives and freedom depend largely on the skill and imagination of managers and engineers, and I hope that God will help them to help us all stay alive and free.
Kurt Vonnegut, "Player Piano"

last edited 2006-01-26 05:00:30 by JoWalsh