Digital Freedom Expo: Day 1

I attended the Digital Freedom Expo, hosted by UWC, which started Thursday.

What a fantastic day!

Of the speakers, first up was the rector of UWC, Brian O’Connell, introduced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (by video, released of course under a Creative Commons license). O’Connell framed the conference in terms of a continuation of the struggle for political liberation, in which of course UWC was actively involved – the focus now being digital liberation.

I always enjoy going to UWC, and the vibe around old struggle veterans. Almost makes me wish for the good old days 🙂 There’s a certain spirit to this institution not present in most others I’ve been to.

Much of the presentation was taken up with HIV/AIDS figures, which I think was a timely reminder to many of the geeks present of the existence, and interconnection with, other, more immediately pressing priorities.

Ebrahim Rasool spoke afterwards, saying he felt like Snow White in the Big Bad Wolf story (ie completely out of place). Perhaps he underestimates himself, as he does have a blog! He did mention however, that most of the comments on his blog were by white males commenting on the street renaming issue, and that part of his purpose at the conference was therefore to save his blog.

Since his last post was on March 6th, about that same renaming issue, perhaps that’s unfair. I look forward though to reading his take on the conference in his blog.

Next up was Duncan Hindle, from the Department of Education, whose talk has been covered by Tectonic.

The morning session was rounded off with a video presentation by Mosibudi Mangena, Minister of Science and Technology.

Formalties out of the way, things heated up after the tea break. Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, and visiting with his family, gave an excellent presentation entitled Free Culture in a Read-Write world.

It’s a presentation he’s probably given hundreds of times before (in fact the next speaker featured a picture of a much younger-looking Lessig framed by an identical slide in the background), with one important exception. He announced, apparently for the first time, that we’ve won (we being the read-writers, as opposed to those who’d like to keep us all as passive consumers), saying that the pessimism in his book Code is no longer warranted.

I’m not sure how that fits with his comments about the risks of losing the free internet, made at the Internet Society of South Africa the previous night, but it’s good to hear some optimism.

Next up was Heather Ford of iCommons. She announced that the Creative Commons license has been translated into Afrikaans, Zulu and Sotho, and that the Sunday Times from this week will be licensing it’s content under a Creative Commons license, which would be fantastic news, and quite a revolutionary step for a newspaper.

After lunch, another of the star attractions, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales presented on Wikipedia and Wikia in general. One of the questioners announced MOPED (I’m not sure it’s spelt this way, as I can’t find any mention of it on Google), a system which reads the Wikipedia articles back in audio format, great for cellphones as well as the visually impaired.

Next up was A.J Venter, in his capacity as a VP of OFSET, giving a talk entitled Since when is freedom rated ‘R’. He talked about, in particular, the lack of ability of express oneself in the school situation (R as opposed to RW), and free software in schools. Slides of his presentation are available from his site.

There were also two parallel sessions happening (though I feel sorry for those competing with Jimmy Wales, or Lawrence Lessig). I headed over to one of these to see Brian Behlendorf, Apache founder, talk on 10 Things you didn’t know about Open Source Software. This was rather poorly attended (many delegates not being aware of the parallel sessions) but was enjoyable and intimate for that reason.

It didn’t quite manage to tell me ten new things, but I did learn that FOSS kept the human genome free (an open project beat a commercial one by a matter of months). A potential use for FOSS that Behlendorf mentioned, which I hadn’t considered, but is potentially very exciting, is in making microfinance more widely available.

As always, it’s the chance to meet people in person that’s the real benefit of events like these, and my Wikipedia translation project looks like making some real progress after the interest it seems to be getting, perhaps thanks also in part to the Sunday Times article.

I look forward to Day 2, and to the Bring ‘n Braai on Friday evening.

Tags: DFX Digital Freedom Expo Jimmy Wales Lawrence Lessig AJ Venter Heather Ford Brian Behlendorf