You are currently browsing the daily archive for März 27th, 2009.
As indicated earlier we did our thing on March 26th because we cooperated with the K34 art gallery in Kiel. We opened at 5.30 pm and prepared cookies and coffee. It was a very rainy day and that seemed not to have encouraged people to come. There were some random guests who were interested in the topic. I was told that the quick info folder that I had printed out contained some errors. Thats whats happening if you try to do things in a few minutes before an event starts. I had been sick for some days and did not work on that before. Additionally to the document freedom infos I also had some flyers about data retention („Vorratsdatenspeicherung“). At 8pm I started my talk in the rear building:
About 8 people listened. In the talk I was trying to combine these the three topics: 1) Free Software, 2) Open Standards and 3) Free Content.
On Free Software I talked about Bill Gates Open Letter to Hobbyists (1976) and the reaction of Richard Stallman (1985) and the BSD (1989). All three topics have in common that they were created as a reaction to what the industry tried to establish as a new standard. In the Free Software part I showed the video of Stephen Fry to the 25th anniversary of GNU. I had edited the german subtitles with Aegisub (which works mostly great) and saved them as .ASS file but strangely in the middle of the video some sentences disappeared. I had tried to fix this before, but was unable to find any error.
Next on where open standards where I focused more on MP3 licensing and patent freedom to get my points accross. I think ODF is a very complex issue and maybe thats the reason why I did not find one movie that was getting the topic accross in a nice way. Most talks about ODF are highly technical or theoretically. I wish we would have something like some short 2-3 minute scenes where it is shown why MS Office is bad and OO.org and ODF is good. Also many material about the topic focuses on OO.org too much. So I did feel more comfortable with the patent issues. I was not trying to sell ODF as a better format itself – my goal was to show why open standards are always better.
The next point was about „Free Content“ – I explained how the copyright protection was extended since the 18th century, the Sonny Bono Act and how and why Lawrence Lessig started the Creative Commons. I showed as success the 140 Million free works, Wikipedia, the free Nine Inch Nails album Ghost I-IV, the development of a culture of sharing and also the Open Access movement.
At the end I showed this episode of the Elektrischer Reporter for more insight on free content.
Was this event successful? Given how few people found the way to the talk I would say definitely not. But ont the other hand the topic was on the Agenda in Kiel today. I had to organize this whole thing alone and only had some helping hands on this day. I would do it again. We only had less than half of the visitors of 2008 SFD. But as you look at SFD vs. DFD the DFD is a lot smaller in all respects. And Kiel is also not a large town (about 1/8 of the size of Hamburg). I could have focused on my talk more. We have waited quite some time for no real visitors – and then had them all on the talk.
I like to work on the material I have started so quickly a bit more, to make it better for future events. It is very important to talk about those topics. It does not matter terribly much if you get the whole points perfect. If people talk they start to think. And as well if they listen to you. The most things will happen inside them. If what you say is true, the arguments will travel with their own energy. I am confident that the DFD will gain mcuh more importance. But I think it is also important to extend its meaning. We need much more good material. I do not like the FAQs etc. and also I dont just want to promote OO.org. People should understand why those things are important. If they just use OO.org they might not even think any different.
Thats it for this year.
