What can not been seen…

“Today Tunisia, Iran, China… there are lots of things that people can’t see there. They can see them with a bit of effort, but most people don’t know how to make that effort.”

I want to highlight parts of the transcript of a meeting entitled “Bloggers in Prison, Too”, which took place on 18 March 2007 at the Centre for Socialist Studies in Cairo, Egypt. The background for the meeting was the case of Abd Al-Karim Nabil Sulaiman, an Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of religion. The discussion touched on many subjects, including the worldwide battle against freedom of expression, the state of Egypt’s opposition groups, young people’s participation in protests, the political role of blogs, the loss of privacy and the spread of wireless Internet technology. Thanks to Benjamin Geer for the translation and the post to [nettime-e] that popped it up on my radar.

The full discussion makes fascinating reading but I wanted to draw attention to the a few WSFII-salient parts…

“Today if you go to my home town in Buhaira, in Al-Kawm Al-Ahdar, you’ll find wireless internet antennas on the towers in which pigeons are raised. That’s a local area network. They can block web sites so that when I’m sitting in Egypt I can’t see that’s out there, but as soon as something gets into our local area network, it will spread” ( page 14 / 50:34 )

“All this is still at the stage of technology that the law permits. When we get to the stage where I say no, why should I just set up the kind of antenna that they allow me to have? I’m going to set up an antenna that can reach a distance of 100 kilometres, and the government won’t be able to do anything about it. Then we’ll see that there’s absolutely no way to block anything. It’ll be a completely decentralised network. They won’t be able to do anything about it.” ( page 14 / 50:57 )

“Some of it [decentralising networks] will be done by activist networks.  Some of it will be done by people as part of development work, and so on.  The natural situation is for this alternative technology, leaving aside the question of its cost, to be adopted among the poor.  And if it’s being adopted among the poor in sub-equatorial Africa, where experience and scientific knowledge are very limited, I don’t see why it wouldn’t happen in Egypt, where we still have universities, graduates, engineers, inventors and so on.” ( page 18 / 1:25:45 )

Wireless Comunity Camp (WCC) 2007

The Wireless Community Camp 2007
The WCC2007 is a wonderful week of cooperation education and care.

The WCC2007 is seven day camping with technicians, opensource users and organizers of a diversity of projects. 100 people from all over the world share their knowledge abount wifi opensource and community
networking.

Also have a look at the website at

http://www.wifisoft.org/trac/wcc-2007/wiki/program

CC-Salon London - June 2007

Creative Commons, the Open Rights Group and Free Culture UK are pleased to announce the first London CC-Salon event, to be held in Shoreditch on Thursday 28th June 2007.

The CC Salon is a monthly event focused on building a community of artists and developers around Creative Commons licenses, standards, and technology, and have been running with great success in cities around the world, including San Francisco, Berlin and Johannesberg. All are welcome, especially anyone interested in Creative Commons, copyright, Free Culture, Open Source, art, media, and music.

CC-Salon will held on the last Thursday of every month, at Juno, 135 Shoreditch High Street, London E1 6JE, from 6.30pm until midnight. The June event will feature contributions from:

• Tom Reynolds (Random Acts of Reality)
• Elizabeth Stark (Free Culture USA)
• Jonathan Roberts (FreeMeDVD)
• and after-dinner.net DJs

In addition, we’ve got 100 free Magnatune.com gift vouchers to give away, courtesy of John Buckman. Each voucher is worth $8, or one album from Magnatune’s large and eclectic catalogue of DRM-free, CC-licenced music.

There’s plenty more planned for future events, and we’d love to hear from anyone interested in participating, whether by performing, exhibiting work, or giving a talk or presentation. Please email Tim if this sounds like you!

CC-Salon London - June 2007 at Juno (Thursday, June 28, 2007) - Upcoming

Free Money - a money workshop with Peter Koenig and Charlie Davies

Free Money
A Money Workshop with Peter Koenig and Charlie Davies

The workshop is intended as a way of exploring some  practical ways of looking at how money works, what kind  of relationships we have with it and how that affects our  work and lives.

London, Saturday, 9 June 2007
10.30am - 5.30pm
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/194517

Brighton & Hove, Sunday, 10 June 2007
10.30am - 5.30pm
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/194514

Fee: £10 deposit beforehand and whatever you would like to pay on the day.
(more information about the fee)

Hive Networks Unlaunched!

Hive Networks is an Open Source project that has developed a DIY kit for ubiquitous computing. During an extensive R&D phase, we have created Hivewares - a range of software tools that transform industrially built, inexpensive, small consumer devices into the much smarter species of Hive device.With Hivewares we offer an easy to use media toolkit that creates networks that can see, hear, move and communicate using a suite of applications that enable a device to gather and disseminate digital content.

Now we invite you to explore the current development phase of the project and hear about art projects past, present and future. We welcome media practitioners, curators, organisers and researchers to examine the project, give advice and come up with ideas for future developments.

17:00 pm: a special reception and debate with the hive-mind
19:00 pm: speeches and hospitalities

rsvp: info at hivenetworks.net

http://www.hivenetworks.net

Wireless Community Weekend

Wireless Community Weekend at c-base Berlin April 26-29, 2007.

This is a free networkers-developer-community gathering.

Click here for more info at https://snr.freifunk.net/trac/wcw

Wiki from the event is here: http://wiki.freifunk.net/WCW2007

Chaos Communication Camp 2007

Chaos Communication Camp 2007  - The International Hacker Open Air Gathering will be at Finowfurt near Berlin. August 8-12. 2007 

“The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. The Camp features two conference tracks with interesting lectures, a workshop-track and over 30 villages providing workshops and gettogethers covering a specific topic.” 

Website: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/

WSFII Workshop, Ghana 2007

Workshop is scheduled from 1st August - 10th August, 2007

WSFII Conference - Ghana 2007 (dates not confirmed)

The 2007 WSFII will be in Ghana.

As for now the event is scheduled  9th August - 11th August, 2007

SAX and WSFII2007

By gufii.net

More on: http://guifi.net/ca/node/7153