[okfn-discuss] dead link / expired domain ?

Sat Jun 12 23:43:33 UTC 2010

On 12/06/2010 15:26, Stefano Costa wrote:
> Hi,
> at http://www.okfn.org/projects/ there is a link to WSFII pointing to
> http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/ but the redirect is apparently pointing to
> http://www.wsfii.org/ which is just a spam site.
>
> And I don't even know what WSFII is :-)

WSFII was wonderful. What did it stand for? World *something* Free 
Information Infrastructures; a conference held in Limehouse Town Hall in 
2005 which Rufus and I co-organised with Saul Albert of The People Speak 
- essentially it was the first Open Knowledge Conference.
We did a whole weekend - which the next OKCon could definitely expand 
to. These were the tracks:

Free Networks - Open Geodata - Open Scientific Data - Open Government - 
Open Hardware - Free Culture - Community Currency Systems

World Summit, that was it. There was a group focused on India that ran 
with the concept, and took the title a lot more seriously than we did.
I'm sorry to hear the domain has lapsed, hoping the schedule is still 
preserved somewhere on the OKF wiki. In my view it was an attempt to 
"spike out" the collective infrastructure of openess.

Open Hardware - is there a movement? Guessing the communities around 
Arduino (modular sensor stuff?) and RepRap (self-printing 3D printers)
are evidence that there is something in sight. Ronja (DIY optical 
wireless networking) was an amazing project, and its creator had 
something that looked like an Open Hardware Manifesto.

I've lost track of the community currency movement a bit, seen the burst 
of interest in Hugh Barnard's cclite project recently.
Whatever happened to Ripple? etc.

Both are much bigger problems - need capital - not the sort of thing we 
can just hack about with minds code and words.

So that, roughly, was WSFII. There was a WSFII publication as part of a 
related series of events - Node.London - don't ask me how that ended.