iCommons Bring 'n Braai reportback

23 Apr 2007

After a somewhat depressing Digital Freedom Expo, it was great to see the energy that Heather Ford and her colleagues (Hi Kerryn! Daniella!) at iCommons had and evoked at the Bring 'n Braai.

One of the greatest thing about the event is that I had multiple distinct groups of friends attending.  I was not just my "open source conference attendees anonymous" friends, or just my "CLUG" friends, but also the friends interested in technology that just don't normally do events, and even more impressively, friends that aren't even particularly interested in the technology itself, but were attracted by the implications of Creative Commons as a movement and on their own lives.  (Oh, and there were those blogging geeks who'll attend anything to get a few hits by writing a reportback.  Weirdos.)

If I've become very disillusioned about the attitudes of those involved in Free and Open Source Software in South Africa, Creative Commons seems to offer something that has applicability and value to a broad part of the population, and the key message of Read Write culture is one that differs from the continuing focus by many stakeholders in Free and Open Source Software in South Africa on the use of such software, and no provision or support or education or recognition for the creation of such software locally.

So, thanks Heather and Kerryn and Daniella and everyone else from iCommons, and also to Dave for MCing, for relief from the apathy I've been feeling for the past six months, and I hope that this event leads to more creators and creation of content, and thus to more reason to come together to savour the output of our creators and their belief in sharing, re-using, and remixing.

 

4 Responses

  1. hummingbird — April 23, 2007 at 05:36 PM.

    Aye Neil... I think you hit the nail very precisely on the head by making explicity the vast difference between the considerable resources being put into promoting the use and adoption of FOSS versus supporting the _creation_ thereof locally.

    It saddens and frustrates me that South Africans still suffer from an inferiority complex that prevents us from supporting and nurturing our own treasure chest of creativity.

    - a

  2. Dave — April 23, 2007 at 08:23 PM.

    Was super-cool to check you there too Neil.

  3. Heather — April 24, 2007 at 09:03 AM.

    Wow, Neil! That makes it even more worthwhile :)

  4. Maximillian Kaizen — April 24, 2007 at 10:32 AM.

    It was a legendary week : did you go to the ISOC talk Neil? Still fascinated that no-one mentioned that the founder of Apache just happened to be tootling his genius-like self at the party too among other sparking minds also invited on the SA Free Culture Tour from parts farflung.

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Hi, I'm Neil Blakey-Milner, a technology generalist most interested by open source, security, and building scalable systems (especially if I get to use the Python programming language).

I "work" at the incredibly fun web-sites-for-everyone startup SynthaSite based in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa.

What I do

  • StarCamp

    I was the main instigator behind this 2-day unconference in December 2007 in Cape Town. There'll be another one in Cape Town around July.

  • GeekDinner

    I help out in making these geek social events happen every two months in Cape Town since March 2007.

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    I make sure that the systems run smoothly at this Cape Town-born Web 2.0 startup.

  • Presentations

    I speak publically on a number of topics - generally related to technical aspects of open source software or on software development.

  • Code

    I've written a few software projects of my own over the years (although mostly I'm the only user of them).

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    I'm far from an artist, but I enjoy capturing my experiences on camera.

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