Kate Milberry

I was fortunate to be able to run an open session at Web of Change. I was hoping to gather together a group of hardcore geeks working on free software projects, or on any tech projects, oriented to progressive social change. I was interested to hear the shit, from the source. This is really a crucial aspect of my research. I think that the theory is important. It is necessary to think about things from a broader perspective – like what we’re doing and where we’re going as a society; like what the fuck is wrong, and why (and how) we should change things.

The guys (and yes, it was all guys, as per) who attended my session were really interesting. No shock there, but the other commonality they shared was a desire to “do good”. Only one was involved in the activist work I typically study (Guamanian, an original Indymedia hack, from IMC Victoria). But it was fascinating to hear their take on my take on things. They were very generous in tolerating my non-geekiness, and the audacity I show in wanting to scrutinize them for academic purposes.

I gave my spiel on what I think tech activism is, its history, and how it imbricates with the global justice movement. I am realizing with increasing despondence that this movement is not on the radar of many people, and the geeks at Web of Change are no different. I had a chat w/Guamanian a.k.a. Dan Bashaw after, a sort of session debriefing, and he agreed that the broader open source community is not just unconcerned with this sort of activism – they are unaware of it. That’s a bit of a nasty shock. But the cats in this session displayed a genuine interest in the topic, which was pleasantly surprising. Dan suggested that probably the only way the tech activist community communicates with the much wider open source community is through its code. That is, not through its guiding philosophy or self-professed ideology, but through the programs that have legs beyond specific activist projects and translate into broader use.

Dan made the very astute observation that what activists learned in the global justice/anti-globalization movement has not translated or crossed over into the more institutional setting of NGOs and non-profits. Many of the activists at Web of Change work in this sector – the professional “social change” sector. In sessions, there has been virtually no discussion of this very major, relatively recent wave of social justice activism – the event-centred, radically democratic, often anti-capitalist activism which earned much (negative, un-analytical, sensational) media coverage from 1999 till the outbreak of the Iraq war. It’s like Seattle et al. never happened for most of the folks here, or if it did, it was but a blip on their activist radar. As Dan said, the only mention of the word “anarchism” was in the hot tub, under the cover of night. Today, someone did call out “spokescouncil” when we were discussing tools for organizing. The facilitator had never heard of it, and asked for a definition. The spokescouncil, as you may know, was a key mode of on-the-spot group decision-making used in the middle of major actions, such as N30, A16, OAS, G8, FTAA etc. etc.

Some of the central points that arose from my session, in no particular order, were:

1. Directly supporting or engaging in social justice issues is important, but so is the broader context within which this happens e.g. the work around privacy done by the Electronic Freedom Frontier; the percolating debate around net neutrality; it is possible to develop code in the spirit of the General Public Licence, if not the letter.

2. Values that inform the free software movement – volunteerism, openness, collaboration, peer review – predate this movement and extend beyond it. The philosophy of free software informs progressive ways to make change, to take power from corporations and to create a more egalitarian society.

3. Open source is an immature movement; it’s relatively new in the public and corporate consciousness. Technical developments remain complex, developer-focused in a way that makes them unmanageable by users. The o.s. community is insular and hostile to critique, despite the fact that usability, upgrading and documentation “suck”. If discussion remains healthy and open [no pun intended, surely – ed.], these problems will be solved.

4. People generally have a hard time solving complex problems collaboratively. You can’t make progress solely by having millions of people talk to each other [e.g. social software phenomenon]; you have to structure the problem… The current tools we have, for example, blogging software, tend to polarize issues into Left-Right, progressive-fundamentalist etc. We need to expose this problem, make it more visible. We need more than just fond memories of conversation.

5. Although the open source community doesn’t necessarily identify with the politics of the free software movement, or embrace Richard Stallman’s notions of free – either in the anarchist or libertarian sense – there’s more commonality between the two than appears at first glance. The working values are identical; for people engaged in software development there is no distinction.

6. There’s a fundamental problem w/current technologies connecting everyone to everything. Everyone has a certain reservoir of good will, to causes not affecting their own life; there’s a personal reservoir and collective global reservoir. Before the internet, only the local community would tap into the reservoir; now there’s a gazillion causes, and the ones who get most attention are ones who manipulate technologies best.

7. You need a theory of change; you build that process [of change] out of short term targets. You need a theory that connects what you to a vision of the world you want to see. The ongoing goal is to make a world that operates by different means.

8. Open source vs. free software: In the short term, short term, day to day, it doesn’t matter [about the philosophy of free software], as long as you have access to source code. But if one of things you want to change in world is huge corporate power patents, the reduction of commons, the privatization of everything, it makes a huge difference. What that does [free software development] is create a new world, so that years from now, you don’t have companies like MS that totally dominate the industry. When we talk about the tools of oppressor, are we feeding into system or are we creating a new system? It’s important to think about in terms of our goal? If, as a developers, we’re thinking in terms of what can we do to create a commons and ensure t hat commons sticks around, free software is extremely important.

Hot damn, that’s enough of that (for now)!

BarCamp Vancouver
August 26/06
Workspace; 120 people registered

After partying into the wee hours the night before (ok, that was me at least) or prowling the streets after midnight on the photowander, 8:30 a.m. the next day came early. There was a great spread (!) but I’d eaten and caffeinated at Tim’s (what can I say? still a Windsor girl at heart).

9 a.m. Scheduling

This was a (very polite and low key) free-for-all. Everyone gathered at a wall covered in brown paper, which was divided into a grid. Prospective presenters looked around for the sharpie and post-it pad (likely in someone’s hands), and wrote their session’s brief title, possibly their name, on the note and stuck it to their desired time slot and room (there were various seating capacities).

9:30 Schedule Confirmation

Here, organizer Darren Barefoot called out each note, asking the presenter to summarize and pitch, in 15 seconds, their session. He would occassionally make a room or time change (in dialogue with presenter). Presenters were also encouraged to collaborate, if they had similar interests, or swap time slots, if need be.

BarCampers were cautioned to check the schedule regularly, as it was apt to change frequently, and without notice for, example, if interest in a session were misjudged.

10 a.m. Sessions begin

There were 8 concurrent sessions with a total of 12 (1/2 hour) timeslots (there was the odd exception, for example, Yoga for Geeks, was an hour-long session).

In Session:

Presenters accepted questions throughout, and sometimes asked audience members to make a mini presentation (to further explain or illustrate some point); audience members sometimes challenged or disagree with presenters, but it was all very amicable; during presentations, people were often on their computers – blogging the session, checking out websites/things related to talk, taking notes, checking their various accounts – sometimes following the presentation online (or “practicing” e.g. in photo camp – trying out tricks, tips etc.). People floated in and out of sessions as interest or time permits

There seemed to be much collaboration and discussion going on in between session, or by people sitting out a session. There was a fairly high level of excitement – certainly much more that what I’ve typically experienced at acaedemic conferences. At one point I commented to a friend that I was actually having fun.

Sessions ranged from the accessible to inaccessible to all but the geekiest, including:

– From Social Signal, 2 dynamo talks: Rob Cottingham’s “Secrets to a killer technology speech” and Alexandra Samuel’s “Tagging for world domination”
– Sarah Pullman’s tech conference mainstay Yoga for Geeks (although I did hurt my neck, ironically enough)
– Lucian Savluc and Zak Greant’s pitch for their upcoming FLOSS conference, eLiberatica, in Romania
– From NewsForge Bruce Byfield’s discussion on the challenges of online journalism; you can check out his write-up for the run-down on BarCamp.

I know I’m the farthest thing from a tech but hot damn some of these cats (and yes, they’re mostly men) are hardcore geeks – computer nerd was the term I always reserved for my brother from his BBS, dial-up days.

Anyway. My presenetation, “Geeks and global justice: How tech activists change the world” was upgraded to a larger room (the Lounge) and to my great surprise, it was standing room only (the floor and chairs being taken). There were a number of questions and a back and forth discussion ensued. Of course, with a half-hour time slot (10 minutes of which were taken up by technical difficulties – the irony is delicious), we couldn’t get into it in much depth. Afterward, however, a number of people came up to me to express their interest in my topic, to tell me about their related work, or to give me their cards and/or offers of assistance in my research. This was heartening indeed. I also met one person who explicitly agreed to be a participant in my project. As I have been experiencing difficultly gathering these people into my fold, I was very pleased.

By the end of the day I was fading and took a break from a particularly geeky session, wherein I was understanding nothing, to have a cup of tea and stare out at the gorgeous view of the north shore (Workspace occupies most of the second floor of an old building in Gastown).

It was, in sum, a successful day – interesting, fun, productive. Not a bad line of work, this.