Leaving Tunis

After a short "last-minute one-person drafting session" to find some language on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks, Free Software and Open Access for the PCT Working Group to go into the Civil Society statement last night, I’ve again endured the bus ride to Hammamet in order to get to my hotel.

When getting on the bus this morning, security asked everyone to open their suitcase, as usual looked into all bags and made me reflect how much time I lost due to security and inefficient transport. My first estimate is that I spent roughly 15 hours on the bus in Tunisia this week, and had around a total of 2 hours of time waiting for busses to finally get going.

This does not factor in lost time due to the need to leave early to make it back to the hotel, and the time spent in front of security scanners. So all things considered, I probably lost 24hrs of working time during this week — although people of course tried to make up for it by networking on the bus. When the secret service bus driver didn’t crank up the pan-flute music so loud that you could not speak comfortably anymore, that is.

Many people in Civil Society felt the presence of security to be quite oppressive, and especially women were telling stories how they could hardly walk five meters without being approached by some guy until some lost their nerve and went back to the hotel. The last time I have personally felt similarly put under surveillance was when visiting the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a schoolkid.

I realise that I have hardly met any Tunisians who I did not have to assume belonged to secret service. Most of the people in Civil Society seemed to belong to what people have begun referring to as "GONGO", which stands for "Governmental Non-Governmental Organisation." Maybe you could also call them SGOs (Secret Governmental Organisations).

This mainly made me sad.

I am sure that many people tried hard to make us feel welcome, to embrace us in Arab and African hospitality. Their work was effectively destroyed by secret service goons in identical grey suits. This is very sad: I am absolutely certain that Tunisia has more to it than secret service, paranoia and repression, but it was made very difficult for us to discover that.

But it is too simple to judge the people of an entire country by the behaviour of its secret service or its government. So I think I should come back to see this country at its best, and find out how people in Tunisia really live. Fortunately there is hope for that: I made contact with some people from the Tunisian Free Software movement, and hopefully we will be in touch.

But first I have to grab my flight back to Germany.

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SchoolNet Jets make “FYOOOSHH!”

Did you know that there is a group of superheros operating in Nambibia that fly cool VTOL harrier-like jets to install computer labs with Free Software in schools in Namibia?

Neither did I until I stumbled upon the WSIS booth of SchoolNet Namibia, an non-profit provider for hardware, internet and training to Namibian schools: they help schools install computer labs, train the teachers and provide support for daily problems.

Since internet is not available everywhere and bandwidth is limited, they use a customised GNU/Linux distribution including OpenLab, which apparently includes quite a bit of information. I should check it out when I get out of WSIS and have a little more time and connectivity.

Meanwhile, they distribute a very cool "Hai Ti!" ("Listen Up!") Comic Strip in which they explain their work and why it is important to the people in Namibia in daily life. If you are in Tunis, I recommend picking up a copy, otherwise you can find it online.

That comic is also where I learned that they have a really cool command center and their VTOL harrier-like jet with which they fly to the schools. Quite the superheroes. That jet "FYOOOSHHed!" over another school where they did not yet have a SchoolNet Lab, giving one student of that school a serious disadvantage when having to compete in a public debate against Helvi, the hero of the first comic. So I guess "FYOOOSHH!" is the sound when you get bypassed by Free Software. 😉

I think we should more often choose such vectors of communication to explain to people what Free Software stands for and how it can help to empower people everywhere in the world.

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Will we one day have a World Intellectual Wealth Organisation?

Besides spreading the word about how Free Software was censored from the "Vienna Conclusions on ICT & Creativity", I also participated in a panel on the ongoing World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reform: As you may know from Karstens Blog, I’ve been working in this field for the FSFE, as part of our own "Changing the WIPO" activities

The panel was coordinated by Robin Gross of IP Justice and had an interesting speaker list, including Alex Byrne, President of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), James Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology (CPT) and Philipe Petit, Deputy Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Since the panel used the term "Intellectual Property" in a rather uncritical way, it was necessary to point out why this term is misleading and harmful to a differentiated and diversified dialog on the various issues that are being thrown together under it. To my surprise, Mr Philipe Petit of WIPO was the first person at the table to agree that the term is problematic and that the areas of law that it refers to are actually very different.

He surprised me further when he said that he would not consider it a problem to move from WIPO to WIWO, a "World Intellectual Wealth Organisation", as a group of NGOs and people have asked in the "WIWO Declaration."

To Mr Petite, "wealth" seemed a purely economic and financial term, while I think it is important to realise that "intellectual wealth" encompasses much more, including values that can hardly be quantified or measured. But that disagreement seems one we could live with in the light of our larger agreement that Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks, as well as other limited monopolies granted by society, are merely tools which are supposed to serve society.

This agreement is quite fundamental, and indeed the Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks (PCT) Working Group has tried without success to get this notion included in the WSIS Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action. It can also not be found in the chapeau of the second phase, it was much too controversial.

WIPO has in the past helped spread the ideology that sharing a CD with your friend is the moral equivalent of robbing a ship and killing the crew — an association created by the rather common "piracy" terminology. But it should be said that they are not the main source of that ideology. That questionable honor rests with the rights-holding industry and the countries that make themselves proxies of their cause: most prominently the United States of America, but also the European Union and its member states (mainly United Kingdom and Germany), Canada and Japan.

These countries are the main obstacle to benchmarking and measuring the outcome of WIPO policies, as is called for in the Development Agenda supported by countries such as Brazil, Argentina, India, Egypt, and many others.

Many people in WIPO are in fact much more open to change than any of these countries, but are forced to do their bidding. So while we need to make sure to keep pushing for reform at WIPO, we also need to uphold that momentum on the national levels. That is an epochal task for which we need everyone to support the work of the organisations that are active in this field.

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Article: WSIS and the Software Challenge

Wolfgang Kleinwächter asked me to write about "WSIS and the Software Challenge" for the UN ICT Task Force Series 8 (2005): "The World Summit on the Information Society — Moving from the Past into the Future"

It was edited by Daniel Stauffacher and Wolfgang Kleinwächter and has now come out with an opening statement by Kofi Annan, a preface by Yoshio Utsumi Edited by Daniel Stauffacher and Wolfgang Kleinwächter. You can go and pick up a copy at the booth of the UN ICT Task Force.

For those who just want to read the article, it is now online at http://fsfeurope.org/projects/wsis/wsis-and-software.en.html.

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The Vienna Conclusion: Sponsorship+Politics=Influence

In June 2005, the Austrian government has been holding a very high-level conference on "ICT & Creativity" as part of the WSIS process. The dignitaries included Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, Director-General of UNESCO Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNIDO Carlos Magarinos and many others. Contributions came from people as renowned as Peter Sloterdijk or Professor Joseph Weizenbaum. You get the idea.

The conference had multiple panels on different issues, and I participated in the panel on "Digital Rights / Creative Commons" along with Richard Owens (Director of Copyright E-Commerce, Technology and Management Division, WIPO), Georg Pleger (Creative Commons Austria), Peter Rantasa (Managing Director, Music Information Center Austria), which was chaired by Nii Narku Quaynor (Chairman and CEO, Network Computer Systems Limited, Republic of Ghana).

The rapporteur of my session was Ralf Bendrath (http://worldsummit2005.org), who summarised the findings of the panel for the conference outcome, coordinating it with all the panelists before sending it in.

After that, we never heard back from the conference, so this is the first time I see the end result myself. Surprisingly, the text I now found in the "ICT+CREATIVITY=CONTENT" labelled brochure "The Vienna Conclusions" is remarkably different from what the panel actually concluded. For your reference, the text is included below.

Primarily: Notions of Free Software have disappeared entirely. In its place you now find the following sentence:

To ensure ongoing innovation, Digital Rights Management (DRM) development and deployment must remain voluntary and market-driven. 

 

Wait a minute. Not only does Digital Restrictions Management have nothing to do with innovation, the Sony Rootkit Case has also shown that hardly anything is ever voluntary about it. But it does have severe implications to several essential civil and human rights. That is why the panel in Vienna was very critical of DRM.

So where did this come from, you may wonder? I have an idea.

One of the main sponsors of the events happened to be Microsoft, and a few of the organisers confidentially told me Microsoft was very unhappy about my participation; to the extent of threatening to leave the conference.

So instead of getting to throw my person out, it seems Microsoft now got to rewrite what the panel actually said.

The conference used lots of formulas like "ICT+Creativity=Content", which also implied that "Content-ICT=Creativity". In this light, I guess what we’ve seen here is the good old formula

Sponsorship+Politics=Influence

And this is definitely not something that can be blamed on the Tunisian government, which has received a lot of heat during this summit. It goes to show things are never black and white here.

So this is the entire text of the workshop. Not the best text I’ve ever participated in, but — especially considering all players involved — also not the worst. You’re invited to pick up the printed version and compare:

Text of Workshop 2 for Vienna Conclusions

Digital Rights and Creative Commons

Human creativity in its expression, results and distribution thereof is currently undergoing a massive transformation. This fundamentally affects the rights of all of humankind. The rights of artists, musicians, scientists, writers, designers, programmers and other creative people must be preserved and strengthened to express themselves freely in their work, to develop and communicate through all media, and to determine how their works are used, including whether they are used for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Because we all can be producers and distributors of content now, everybody should also have a right to get education that builds capacity and enables these cultural expressions. The public – as users, consumers, and citizens – has a right to access and use information and knowledge. This includes fair access to culture, but also a protection of fundamental human rights and civil liberties like privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of information, and the rule of law.

The new possibilities of content production and distribution also impact incentive structures and underlying economic models. The worldwide copyright system is currently undergoing a transformation giving more choices to creators and users. Increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost no cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the Free Software model is one example, licenses like "Creative Commons" that only reserve some rights and permit wide use and distribution is another. Distributed collaborative production models like Wikipedia also show that there are other incentives than money to create quality content.

In the digital age , the business models of copyright intermediaries will only be viable if they offer quality services on top of the content. The challenge ahead is to develop an economy of sharing, collaboration and service that will, at least in the near term, coexist with the traditional economy of scarcity, control and technological restrictions. Our knowledge and culture is the reservoir from which new content is created and in which creativity finds its fertile ground. It must therefore remain accessible to the public under reasonable and fair conditions. Copyrights and patents were developed in part to create incentives for production of quality content, and their role should be reexamined in order to meet this goal in the future while safeguarding the public interest in access to information and culture.

Software must be understood as the cultural technique of a digital society. With ICTs permeating all aspects of everyday life, software acts as social regulator. Similar to law it controls essential parts of human interaction and creativity. Unlike law it knows no exceptions and is ultimately binding. It is therefore seminal for society to shape, make transparent and control the codified rules that in turn shape society. This is where freedom as a fundamental human right and prerequisite of democracy meets collaborative creative approaches. Political freedom in the digital age depends upon technological freedom, which ensures access to the cultural heritage of humankind for present and future generations.

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WSIS blog aggregation

FYI: there is a blog aggregation project online at http://www.wsisblogs.org. You will find more details on people in hunger strike, on repression and on the internet governance issues, as well as side-events that are taking place here.

And I just submitted the RSS feed of this blog, as well.

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Business as usual: secret service, rfid, repression

The Tunisian government is deadly afraid of Civil Society.

There is no other explanation for what is going on here in Tunis. And since I assume that most of you have never had first-hand experience of this kind, let me describe my first 14hrs in Tunis.

Arriving at 23:30, having passed immigration and security on the way OUT of the airport, there was no way to register last night. So I took one of the buses supplied by the local organisation. That bus brought us to the "bus hub", where we were redistributed on buses to the different hotel locations. This took a while and obviously speed was not a concern of the organisers. When we finally left the bus hub, it was around 1:00. Yes, we had spent 45 minutes sitting on the bus waiting for it to finally get going.

On the trip to Hammamet we saw something remarkable: every one or two hundred meters, there was a guy in a suit standing by the highway. Possible explanations: a) the government is really worried the highway may get stolen, b) standing in a suit on a lonely stretch of highway at night is a very popular past-time in Tunisia, c) they feared we would kidnap the bus and fly it to Latin America, d) they were really afraid of the Civil Society bunch in the bus.

What is additionally interesting about this is that each bus has a driver and an additional "tour guide" kind of guy, although they never speak to the people on the bus. Given that they usually seem to have no idea where they are and stories tell of buses getting lost for hours, people here figure they are secret service agents.

The other stories you hear are telling similar tales: Last night, the Heinrch Böll Foundation for instance held an event with 30 participants, for which the Tunisian government had 50 security goons stop people from entering once the event had begun. To give you an idea: Not even the German ambassador could make it into the side event, he likewise got turned down by Tunisian secret service goons.

But I digress: Owed to the extreme efficiency of the bus distribution system, I ended up in my hotel around 2:30, too tired to do anything but get some sleep.

This morning, the journey continued as it had begun: by bus. Arriving at the bus hub, I had to make my way to the registration place (by bus), wait in a long line for the security check and another long line to get my great badge.

And unlike Geneva, people here are now very open about the badges containing RFID chips. Provided they have a similar sensor outfit to what we saw in Geneva, they should now know who is in which room at which time with whom. Sweet.

Back to the KRAM conference center (by bus) and just through one more security check, I finally arrived at the WSIS. By then it was 13:00. Getting an idea of the place, what is going on, saying hello to some people and giving my first small interview then completed the experience.

While saying hello to other people from Civil Society, I also heard that the Tunisian government is now about to stop side-events outside the KRAM Palexpo, which is conveniently isolated from the Tunisian people. In protest, several Civil Society side-events inside KRAM have been canceled — and some governments are considering to protest officially.

So business as usual at the WSIS…

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Off to Tunis

I am aware that I am likely to get the "luxury version" of Tunis, and unlike Tunisian people won’t have anything to fear from speaking my mind — also because that is what "THE FAQ" says.

I still have to say it feels weird to go to a country where journalists get imprisoned for doing their job, where the Böll Foundation is forbidden to meet with a local Non-Governmental Organisation for "security reasons" and where the alternative Citizens Summit is apparently being stopped by making sure they don’t get the space they rented.

It fits into this picture that while WLAN is apparently readily available for Windows notebooks only: I’ve been told the infrastructure was supplied by Microsoft, who as the main sponsor had its own, broken DHCP implementation installed. So now only similarly broken implementations of that standard can get IP addresses without problems.

My PCT Working Group co-coordinator, Francis Muguet, had to reboot into WIndows, complete DHCP handshake once, and then was able to get the same IP address under GNU/Linux. I’ll have to find a solution for myself, I guess, as I obviously do not have Windows installed on my notebook.

Speaking of Windows installations: After the Cybercafe in Geneva at WSIS 2003 ran pretty much exclusively on Free Software, the original setup in the conference center now was exclusively Microsoft Windows, even though the agreements said it should be 50/50 or dual-boot.

With some grassroots activism this seems to have been fixed at least to some extent by now, but it remains to be seen how many machines will actually run Free Software — and how many will just be running Windows because that is what people are addicted used to, and because they will never know that an alternative exists.

Overall, that software policy seems to fit the overall situation of the place, though.

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Back from tweakfest.ch 2005

Although their web site was unusable for heavy Flash usage, the tweakfest.ch 2005 was actually very interesting. Thanks again to all the organisers for an entertaining event, interesting discussions and a good time. One of my personal highlights was Fuminori Yamasaki of the iXs ("Cool Robotics") Research Corporation with his talk "Robots are better Dancers" including a demonstration of the KHR-1 eco-robot, which they sell in a do-it-yourself kit for 1000 USD:
(click on image for larger version)
The robot on this picture did a complete sideways flip-over during the demonstration, pretty amazing.You should also check out their web page for pictures of the dancing robots.

Now that I am back to Hamburg, it is time to prepare for the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis. A very cool thing I discovered during the ESLAM III conference in Manaus was this set of Brazilian WSIS stamps, which Sergio Amadeu da Silveira had with him:
(click on image for larger version)
Naturally my favorite is the "Software Livre" stamp.

I just hope those tickets will be in the mail tomorrow.

P.S. Before I forget: While in Switzerland, John Leach sent mail that the "Everybody loves Eric Raymond (except me)" t-shirts are finally there. Check them out.

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It’s official: Going to Tunis

As many of you may know, the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is taking place 16. to 18. November in Tunis. To this point, Free Software Foundation Europe has been very active in the WSIS so far, participating not only in the first phase actively, but also in followup-conferences, involving mainly myself, but also Karin "kyrah" Kosina and Jonas Öberg.

And while the United Nations often look like the perfect real-world application of Bullshit Bingo, discussions on this level set the course for humankind for many years to come. But while the first phase saw several quite productive moments, the second phase of the WSIS was very educational, and not exactly in a good way for the most part of it.

One reason for this is certainly the location of the second phase: Tunisia. A country with beautiful landscapes, an old culture and a tradition of human rights violation. And there were apparently quite a few people worried about this — otherwise the WSIS web site would hard offer a set of "FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES GRANTED TO PARTICIPANTS IN THE SECOND PHASE OF THE WORLD SUMMIT ON THE INFORMATION SOCIETY".

Like Tunisia, too many places in the world still need frequently(!!!) raised and answered questions about the existance of basic human rights. That is why the Tunisian Civil Society acitvists have asked all of us to go there and remind people that the only opinion you’re free to have in Tunisia is that of the government. And while it scares me, it is a reason to go there.

I’ll keep you posted and would like to take the moment to thank all of you for joining the Fellowship: Your contribution has made it possible for FSFE to send me to that event, hopefully doing some good. But before going there I will first go to Zürich tomorrow, where I’ll participate in the tweakfest.ch.

I hope I’ll see some of you there.

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