[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

German privacy NGO FoeBuD is planning ‘Social Swarm’. An international campaign that will encourage people to turn their back on the big, centralized, data-hungry social networks.

“We want a social network that deserves to be called “social”. We want a social swarm!”

In the May 2010 there was QuitFacebookDay, which resulted in nearly 40.000 users leaving Facebook. In the (near) future there is Social Swarm: a much larger and coordinated campaign to switch to a ‘good’ alternative for ‘Faceboogle’, realized together with many people and organizations.

The initiators are currently looking into ‘candidate’ software projects to collaborate, as well as discussing and collecting the criteria and requirements on their website. In respect to the network architecture, it is interesting to note their critical annotations on decentralized federated alternatives:

“Federated servers are a major privacy headache: Instead of having one company that can spy on you and sell your data you suddenly enable several companies or private parties to do so.”

In the former posting about Diaspora, I wrote that when you join a ‘pod’ instead of your own, it a matter of trust. When you consciously share information with other users, it may very well be the case that it is stored on a server out of your reach. Who has access to your information, in federated networks, will always be dependent on the network architecture, the user’s sharing settings and activities. The bottom line is that ‘you are in control’. Which means that you initially decide what information to share and with whom, as opposed to one corporate entity -with all your data on its server- deciding it for you.

Social swarm, however, questions if users are really ‘in control’ in a decentralized federated network setting. The proposed solution by Social Swarm for ‘good privacy’ is a truly distributed peer-to-peer networking alternative by design: one that does not depend on servers. One which facilitates end to end encryption and doesn’t store ‘clear text user data’ on servers.

Social Swarm aims for the development of something unique and difficult to imitate: a network that enables all of its users to communicate ‘freely’. A free and secure means of communication for everybody and everything.

If you are interested in joining forces, discussing and developing the Social Swarm, check out the invitation, website  and flyer.

Last week, November 3rd, an activistic salon was held at the underground Vondelbunker in Amsterdam, organized by squatting collective Schijnheilig. The activistic salon is a weekly event that brings people together around various themes to present and discuss critical perspectives, issues and actions. About twenty people gathered to focus on the downfall of centralized social media and the rise of decentralized systems. More specifically, we engaged in a lively discussion about Facebook’s issues and the potential of Diaspora.

“Facebook is not a neutral medium. Neutral as in the air we use to convey this message”

There was a general introduction to Facebook’s issues: harming online privacy, taking irrational censorship measures, problematizing data ownership and control. Moreover, the main concern was that Facebook should not be regarded as a ‘free’ service at all, since the trade-off for using the social network website actually is massive. Facebook would namely have enabled, promoted and standardized ‘spying for free’: always having free access to your data.

How did Diaspora came to be? That it is a grassroots open-source software project, crowdfunded through Kickstarter and initiated by four students from New York is most likely clear by now to anyone reading this. However, some may not recall a particular mention-worthy presentation by Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University and Founding Director at the Software Freedom Law Center, that inspired the creators of Diaspora in the first place: ‘Freedom in the cloud’, 02-02-2010 at NYU.

“The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”.” (Full transcript here)

Furthermore, light was shed on the decentralized/distributed networking architecture of Diaspora. Decentralization means that instead of all your data stored on a central server belonging to a corporation that threats your data like their own, you set up your own decentralized servers to store your data and communicate with others, without ‘the middle man’ exploiting your information and communication. Together these nodes form a distributed social network.

If this still is unclear, you might find ‘What is a distributed social network’ useful.

The people of Greenhost invited everyone to their Diaspora pod Nesc.io which runs on sustainable energy. They made clear that when you don’t  run your own Diaspora pod, and join an existing one instead it is still very much a matter of trust, just like trusting your Internet Service Provider.

Diaspora was deemed a promising and inspiring alternative that is still in its early development stage (The beta is to be launched soon). Though there were a few in the audience who questioned Diaspora’s interface and me-centrism. It would still be ‘too similar to Facebook’ and judging from the adopted Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights it would be all about the individual users and much less about collective efforts. However, CFP’s Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights was created exactly in response to the issues and concerns that arose out of Facebook -over time- and it is only with the best intentions that Diaspora adopts the Bill: giving social media users proper control over their information(flows). Needless to say, the development of Diaspora itself is a great collective effort.

N-1 was briefly mentioned to explain that decentralized alternative social networking sites/techniques can be very different from one another. Indeed, it is interesting to examine how these alternatives will continue to unfold, develop and differ.

The Activistic Salon was a great opportunity to discuss Facebook’s issues and the potential of decentralized alternatives. Hopefully we will see many more of these initiatives. For it is the right time to ask yourself and others: How aware are you about the social media issues at play..and how can you do something about it? Alternatives in social media. What difference do they make?