[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

This panel session was pretty intense, as was the following debate. Below an overview of each presentation.

Elijah Sparrow‘s speech was focused on presenting the Crabgrass platform, a social network for activist groups currently in an early alpha phase, but nonetheless serving some 30.000 users already. Theoretically based on a very specific idea of networking (decentralized, supporting labor-sharing and alternative economies), Crabgrass is a software libre that provides tools specifically designed for the needs of groups, rather than individuals. Sparrow defines the 10-people staff running the service as “organization-obsessed anarchists”, working on a combination of paid and unpaid labor and relying mostly on small private donations.

(Click here for the video of this debate)

Read the rest of this entry »

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.