A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the Software Freedom Day in Cancun, the first SFD in that city. The development of the event was quite nice since we were able to capture most of the moments of the event and include things that have become a signature of the events from Tequila Valley Cancun including the “Freedom Cake” and some gifts to give out after each talk.
The event was well promoted and included things like TV broadcast of the event, development of new web application and even some streaming.
Talks included new bleeding edge topics like Bitcoins, Git, and some more traditional topics like Creative commons and recomended books on cyberculture and hacker culture.
The idea of this event is step away from the traditional Linux OS and their application environment and learning more about the ideals that make software free. The opportunities and empowerement behind open technology and also inspire atendees to innovate.
During Campus party there was a great panel about the participation campaign with the government on topics such as governance, transparency, and the digital advocacy prepared with #InternetNecesario and #OpenACTA. As well as raising awareness with other important challenges which the community needs to work together to raise the issue to a national platform.
Things like the regulation of bandwith in the national telecomunication industry. With isssues such as why TELMEX, the telecomunication monopoly can’t really offer high bandwiths as opposed to other countries.
How part time ignorance and part time corruption from the regulatory parts have a very permisive ruling upon the regulation of information across the nation and trasparency still a far cry as well as huge ignorance around internet surveilance mechanisms.
In the upcoming #SoftwareFreedomDay also come as a great timing in which many issues are arising across the internet. Where talks such as the globalvoices unveils evidence of hard internet surveilance in Egypt during the revolution. Where France president Sarkozy made declarations about “Government being the only legitimate representative of the will of the people” during the #EG8 a few months back. Which put things in perspective after also thinking that government have a monopoly on violence since they hold the army.
Culturaly speaking the Mexican state of affairs has a very tamed society where they look up for the government to take care of them. A very contrarian culture compared to the liberal American society where they inheritely don’t trust the government. Besides that, is real that there are already movements like Wikileaks, LULSec and Anonymous which start doing digital protesting and whisle blowing.
The important point here is that the only REAL strangehold on government will come from an economic protest. So when digital protest and economic conspiracies match we would start seen a new level of forcing the government to act upon the will of the people.
But going back to the talk in Campus Party, @javierlivas took a somewhat extreme position on overthrow the current state of the government. Not just the president and legislators but current idea of how to handle democracy. An interesting point he mention a few times was that the organization for the current event was larger than the current effort to run the country. Which means that with the total ammount of people in the event would be more than enough to build this new government.
Unfortunately beside the ranting there wasn’t a clear proposal. But the idea of digital governments are nonetheless being worked upon. Digital governments are being structured at least by lasindias.coop which talk about this phyle societies that self govern and are economically sustainable to build a more participatory model of governing as opposed to the distributed model derived from old analog systems. Real proposals on how to build the new digital patriotism for a group that breath and live on the web is an idea that usually has been suggested with the Internet map and “if Facebook was a country” analogies.
But having a real Internet state,with means of earning a living through independent economic systems like BitCoins and embracing a new nationality that give you access to benefits such as education, professional advice as well as maybe other benefits could start becoming something that people might start considering. Unfortunately challenges such as the movement of non-digital assets such as servers, electricity and access might present issues to believe this offering.
I usually remember the talk that I got in high school when our teacher describe to us the system which the mormon religion works. Where the religious tax also give benefits to their followers and the church really acts as a more effcient cooperative system to expand economically.
The talk covered also the other view of participating with the government in this change on a gradual pace. But we still haven’t focus on enough social capital to make a movement at any level. Whenever is transformational or to enforce a gradual change, I think we got many things to work before we can make such changes.
As Software Freedom Day approaches things like own cloud and just ensuring our digital sovereignty will be at the center piece of the event. And topics like this one could become something important for thinking about and considering.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 