[wsfii-discuss] Re: WSFII -> London?

Sat Mar 5 07:13:42 UTC 2005

Hi Armin, all,

I know i just wrote this to Julian, but I do want to emphasise it again,
because it's really important that this is clear...

WSFII is not *just* about Free Networks and wireless - although because it is
part of a continuing series of freifunk events that come from that field, it
will be Free Network flavoured.

A World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures is a broader approach - a
public event that will happen on a weekend in September/October. The week of
workshops, as I understand it, will be organised the typical ramshacle London
way - because we don't need anything else. The week of working will be
concentrated - far fewer people, doing speicfic projects.. preparing for India
2006, writing docs etc. etc. Of course this can be as large or as small as
necessary - but hosting hundreds of people in London for a week will be
horribly expensive and difficult to organise. So please can the week-long bit
be ramshackle enough for us not to have to overorganise and resource it?

The format suggestion is to do the bulk of public stuff on the weekend - and
for this to be a unique opportunity to bring together all kinds of Free Info
Infrastructure people - Free Geodata, Free Software, public domain taxonomies,
Free Money (LETS) schemers, Free Hardware geeks etc. etc, many of whom are
already being catered for by Rufus' organisation - okfn.org. 

We (the Free Networkers among us) can then concentrate on building up an agenda
and communicating with others about how to connect up our FII disciplines at
the edges - so when the 'summit' comes, it is actually something like a summit
- with motions proposed and passed, and long-term alliances forged between FII
groups. I think ther are an increasingly coherant set of ideas around this area
that have been growing together for a long time - this is just a timely event
that would try to make some of them gel explicitly.

It would also be really interesting for us to go and listen to other people
talk about what they're doing in their FII field for the public event bit of
the meeting, rather than hearing our own talks again...

> so it can be done. But it would be a shame if it would be done in the 
> typical london ramshackle way and by skimming resources from 
> usual suspects such as arts council or british council because 
> however closely I look, I fail to see the artistic element in it 

Well since we have some money to use partly as barter and match-bait, it would
be a bit silly not to use it, especially as I think there are many valid
connections between the areas we're talking about and artists who are rigorous
enough to want to use FIIs to make their work... but this is not a debate for
the list .. rather for the pub :)

> asking me, fairly inefficient wireless london quango 

:) Thanks Armin.. we're doing our best!

> together and do something for real. Funding could probably be 
> resourced from a range of entities, from ngo's, businesses, local 
> government, big government, department of trade and industry, 
> department for, whats it called, development aid, etc. 

Do we have any clear idea of how much we'd need? I suspect more than the 5-10k
mooted earlier. Let's make some speaker suggestions over the next few days and
do an airfare/hotel/feeding/venue calculation then go after these kinds of
funds in as many ways as we can think of ..

> However, doing all this would need a straight organising person. Maybe John
> Wilson can be asked to do it or somebody else can be found. Linking up with
> the rural broadband initiatives here in the UK would probably be a good idea
> anyway. 

Absolutely, we should definitely give John a call - he's been working with
Julian on the Open Spectrum consultation and I'm sure he'd be able to call in
some interesting people on the  Free Networks front. 

It think it would be ideal to have one person from each of the fields that we
envisage participating in WSFII on the organising team - at the moment we're
pretty Free-Network heavy! 

Jo, I assume you'll be representing the Geo geeks, Armin, Julian, James,
Jeurgen, Thomas, Sebastian perhaps between you, you guys could take on sorting
out the free net workshops (which will be more fuzzily organised, I'm thinking,
and probably more fun!) and representation from the Freenet side. We can look
into other workshop resources (eg.  limehouse avaiable to any who need it for
the week.. or deckspace, or greenwich town hall... whatever). Rufus and I can
concentrate on gathering in people from other FII groups and making sure they
get an organiser on the team. So we need some librarian/taxonomists, some free
TV people, some free radio people, some free hardware hackers (dave green I
suppose)...

What other disciplines can we think of!? This is the question we need to answer
soonest, then, as Rufus suggested, start to compile lists of people to invite.

So, I'll have a crack at getting something on the web tomorrow (oops, today)
and pointing WSFII.org at something useful. 

Btw, did everyone join the wsfii-discuss list? -
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wsfii-discuss/

Cheers,

Saul.