Digital Freedom Exposition

30 Jan 2007

The folks at UWC are hosting a "Digital Freedom Exposition" on the 19th and 20th of April later this year.  International big names like Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) and Lawrence Lessig (of, amongst his many activities, Creative Commons fame) will be there.  It's still early days, so there's not yet a fixed programme or a complete list of speakers, but it looks like it should be a good event.

Positive points for:

  • Including at least one South African in the keynote speakers;
  • Getting some cool international speakers;
  • Marketing things in terms of freedom and getting people interested via UWC's historical involvement in such things;
  • Making the event coincide with the UWC careers exhibition, creating a massive awareness and education opportunity;
  • Having two pretty cool goals around a major problem I think we have - lack of awareness and celebration of local achievements and the people who've been involved in making them:
    • to highlight and identify achievements and opportunities, celebrate them, and make them known broadly among all stakeholders
    • to sample the landscape of Free and Open Source Software companies, especially in the Western Cape, who can render services to UWC and other organizations

Cynically (and, perhaps, idealistically rather than pragmatically), lost points for:


  • Not trying to be more daring and pushing a lot harder to put local people in place of international speakers (especially for the keynotes).  We need to build local heroes, and we're not affording them the space to do so.
  • Comparing voluntary user choice between open source/free software/creative commons and proprietary software and content to the struggle against apartheid.  Although, patents and DMCA-like laws certainly are comparable, copyright isn't (at least to me and many other people who might support actions against patents and DMCA-like laws).  It's like using the term "intellectual property" - shoving a bunch of different things together and trying to treat them the same.

3 Responses

  1. Derek — February 10, 2007 at 07:32 PM.

    The points against are a misunderstanding. In fact we do have local speakers, but we needed the international speakers to attract them. Secondly, nowhere do we compare voluntary user choice between open source/free software/creative commons and proprietary software and content to the struggle against apartheid. We say that these very freedoms are under threat, and that as an institution that once stood up to Apartheid, maybe we should now be shifting focus to other threats to freedom. This is about what we do as an institution, the story was simply misread.

  2. Neil Blakey-Milner — February 10, 2007 at 10:59 PM.

    Derek,

    I'm sure you just missed the part where I said "cynically", "idealistically", "rather than pragmatically", and "more" and "harder".  My overall thoughts are that the effort in terms of getting local speakers was good, but I wish there were more local speakers.  No matter how many local speakers, I wish there were more - that's what being idealistic means.  (Although I'm confused as to why one needs international speakers to attract local speakers - can you clue me in?)

    By using the device of highlighting UWC's position in terms of apartheid (which, as I mentioned, is good marketing), it's just an unfortunate side-effect that it can easily be read that creators of proprietary software and content are the oppressors of the digital (I prefer "information", personally) world, and that open source/free software/creative commons is the freedom.

    So, as you can see, I was just looking at things from as many sides as I can - I think that helps us keep honest, and helps keep us on guard about how our messages can be received through different decoders.

    And the good in this case way outweighs the bad, so congratulations.

    Neil

  3. Derek — February 11, 2007 at 08:56 AM.

    We initially contacted 5 international speakers, and about 8 local speakers. All 5 international speakers have confirmed. Of the locals contacted, only three have so far agreed to speak. 

    I would say in a way, there are those who would usurp our freedoms by:

    • lobbying for changes to the law;
    • exploiting loopholes in the law;
    • create technologies that remove rights that should be guaranteed in law;
    • using international treaties and agreements, and their position of power in the world to get other countries to change their laws so that they become less democratic.
    in order to protect or gain business advantage. These are the threats to freedom, and they are as significant as grabbing land, maybe even more so as the brain does not have the same physical limits on productivity as land does. So in a way, the analogy is not a bad one, even though thats not how we used it.

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