[schedule proposal]

The participation to the The Global Square at Berlin Biennale is divided in two types of activity: Nodes (contents) and Actions.

Nodes are:

1.- TGS
Starting date: 27 April
Presence: 2 months

TheGlobalSquare is a decentralized social and organizational environment which respects privacy and transparency for individuals, public organizations and actions. TheGlobalSquare will consist of P2P user profiles which allow communication through a variety of social mediums. This will enable global networking between local assemblies, task groups and events. TheGlobalSquare will work to create secure global
communications infrastructure and hardware to make such services widely available.

Tribler
Lorea
Diaspora
call4developers

2.- P2P
Starting date: 7 May
Presence: 1 week

Entirely distributed networks are the proven way to a truly free network, based on cooperation among peers to define tasks, commons and goods. This allows for the establishment of an automomous decision-making process throughout the network.

p2pfoundation
Tribler
Bitcoin
Freenet

3.- Social networks
Starting date: 14 May
Presence: 1 week

Corporate social networks are the main tools that have been used during 2011 by Occupy and similar movements worldwide. These social networks have become essential to spread movement ideals and to coordinate direct actions. However, utilizing corporate social media is a risky option concerning freedom, privacy, transparency. We will introduce existing self-organized social networks that are based on free software
philosophy and commons principles.

Lorea
Diaspora
Social Swarm
Briar
Sukey

4.- Privacy
Starting date: 21 May
Presence: 1 week

Why are we still communicating through unsecure corporate-owned systems such as Gmail, Skype and Facebook? During these last months we’ve seen the importance of privacy and anonymity in #revolutions taking place in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia, where unsecure dissemination puts one’s life at a risk. We are also seeing many new corporate “privacy” policies and government laws that allow user data to be easily handed to third parties with little to no consideration for the user’s rights or personal safety.

Telecomix
Secushare

5.- Free culture / hacktivism
Starting date: 28 May
Presence: 1 week

The so-called “entertainment industry” is pressuring for laws that restrict access to culture and impose censorship. This violates our universal human right of free access to information and knowledge. We shall have a debate about the implications and current status of Internet laws such as ACTA, HADOPI, SINDEWERT, SOPA, PIPA, CISPA. We will also define future global strategies and campaigns to fight against restrictions of free information access.

La quadrature
FCF
hacktivistas.net

6.- Economy of the commons
Starting date: 4 June
Presence: 1 week

Governments call it a crisis, but it’s actually the end of an unecessarily destructive financial system. Other initiatives are already being put into practice that directly connect peers. An economy of the commons is now possible, where people manage the economy collaboratively, and where money is just a tool of facilitation.

Bitcoin
Flattr
Kraut
Goteo
German currency projects

7.- Open hardware / robotics
Starting date: 11 June
Presence: 1 week

Generally we talk about free software, but hardware also must become free so that we are no longer dependent upon corporations to produce patented products. In a world where much work can be automatized, we can begin to consider the possibility of a distributed robotic network. Such a system could avoid planned obsolescence and allow the world far greater sustainability.

8.- Social Media
Starting date: 18 June
Presence: 1 week

During year 2011, the #revolution has enhanced the importance of social media. The intensive use of social networks as communication tools means that anyone can become a journalist, that the people have become the media. We can now spread the message of our actions to the world, showing what is happening in each #revolution despite being ignored and misreported on by corporate media.

DATES: End in June so that we may coincide with Brazil livemedia forum and connect via stream with them

Indymedia
occupy comm teams
Wikileaks central
Altermet
Globalleaks
Mosireen
Adbusters

Conclusions, schedule and future events

The last week of the Biennale will be a time to reflect on the work done, to plan tasks and events, and to establish milestone goals for the near and distant future.

Starting date: 25 June
Presence: 1 week

Actions:
Coordination meeting from #occupy movement tech-teams
Hacking the streets
Hackathons
Install party
Workshops (how to encrypt mail, use a blog, on each of our tools (lorea,
diaspora, etc …)
Talks (what is free software, free culture, ….)
Copystation so people can copy free culture material

Social media startup company ‘Unthink’, already referred to as the ‘Anti-Facebook’, has launched the beta version of its website. Unthink positions itself as a more ‘open’ and more ‘honest’ form of social networking. The users supposedly are ‘the owners of their data’, and not the ‘product’ being sold to advertisers. At first sight, the videos, pictures and catchy one-liners of Unthink are appealing to anyone who is critical about the ways in which social media monopolies operate. A closer look, however, quickly turns the appealing into appalling, as soon one realizes it is a commercial corporation that’s literally trying to sell you freedom in a social networking infrastructure that centralizes branding.

Unthink to Facebook and Google – It’s F U time

Instead of exploitation of immaterial labour through user generated content and targeted advertising, an Unthink user has to become an endorser of the brand, advertising the brand to friends in order to use the service, or pay 2 dollar a year. This is an alternative for Facebook, but clearly not dealing with the exploitative nature of social media monopolies.

It’s actually worse. Powerful terms like ‘open’, ‘freedom’, ‘honest’, ‘control’, ‘ownership’, ‘privacy’ and ‘revolution’ are deceivingly used to appeal to everyone who is sick of Facebook and propose it’s a completely different social networking site. As someone remarked on the Unlike Us mailing list: ‘(..) where is the source code’? Nowhere. Well, I did a Google search for Unthink.com +open source and got many returns containing this dreadful sentence:

“The UNTHINK Deed, Emancipation Covenants, and Privacy Policy are as revolutionary for social media as the open source movement was for software development.”

Those who had enough of FB have probably already discovered that true freedom, openness, ownership and privacy control comes with open-source alternatives like Diaspora, GNUSocial, Crabgrass and many others.

Unbelievable. Techcrunch writer Sarah Perez wrote “Unthink is Diaspora done right”, which is totally untrue. Diaspora is all about building a people centric social web as opposed to a corporate centric social web. They both emphasize the ability to control privacy, but which alternative doesn’t? Actually Diaspora never was about destroying or replacing Facebook, but Unthink seems to be..and it does so with branding (!?!??!?!). This is a pretty bad comparison to make.

‘Honestly’. The only good thing that can come out of this is generating more attention for/and discussion about what openness, freedom and control really means for social media users and how decentralized social media alternatives are able to live up to those promises.

We better not Unthink. Think again!

Unthink Beta Launch Review