Wizards
of OS 2
-- Open Cultures & Free Knowledge --
at the
House of World Cultures Berlin
October 11-13, 2001
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Press Release 2, August 16, 2001
Subject: press release: Wizards
Of OS 2
Wizards of OS 2 International Conference at
the
"Defending the freedom of knowledge is probably the most important task facing us in the future." (Professor Norbert Szyperski at Wizards of OS 1) Free software has proven that freedom, openness and community work. And it has proven this in the very area of technology that forms the core of the digital "knowledge society" and, as such, is the battlefield for fierce competition. It appears entirely improbable that, in a market built up over thirty years by large companies such as Microsoft, Sun and IBM, loosely organized groups of free developers could attain a market share of 60 percent. The fact that this improbability has become a reality makes it one of the great confrontations of the late 20th century. In the meantime, free computer programs such as GNU/Linux and Apache have long since proven their quality and one can legally refer to Microsoft as a monopoly. It has grown quieter around the long battle between David and Goliath. What we will nevertheless be dealing with for years to come is the loss of credibility for proprietary industrial production and distribution of intellectual goods as well as the growing respect for the alternative: a free and open cooperation of collective intelligence. As Richard Stallman, one of the founders and evangelists of the movement often says, it's not about software; it's about the kind of society we want to live in. Wizards of OS 2 -- like WOS 1 in July 1999 -- will focus on free software as a starting point. From there, we can begin to ask: What sort of light can it shed on knowledge systems as a whole? What new tools are being developed to support open cooperation? What are the effects of various forms of "intellectual property" such as copyrights and patents? What impact do they have on the management of economic information, on the intellectual practice of private individuals and on the exchange between north and south? Grassroots communities are collectively writing encyclopedias, teaching materials and music. But what about the public knowledge in libraries and archives, in education, in peer-to-peer exchanges in various fields of research, in public broadcasting and in the management of government? After one and a half centuries in which the author and the cult of genius have shaped the ways in which we deal with knowledge, a new collective intelligence is rapidly emerging. In what ways does the infrastructure of knowledge have to change in order to optimally support it? WOS 2 addresses people working on the same problems and, instead of competing with each other, creating open communities, exchanging the results of their discoveries, learning from each other and, together, creating something bigger than the sum of its parts. It was the threat of a general trend toward increasing control on the part of the knowledge industry that made visible the full extent of the revolution free software represents.
### MAIN TOPICS ### Only a small selection of the
topics to be addressed during WOS 2 in lectures, panels, tutorials, artistic
events and informal discussions can be listed here. You can see the full
current program here: An ongoing, updated list of speakers can be found here: http://mikro-berlin.org/Events/OS/wos2/speakers.html
*** Free Software *** When IBM sought to attain a license for the free Web server Apache in 1998, the company couldn't even find anyone authorized to discuss a possible contract. Today, hardware and software companies have set up their own Open Source departments. BRUCE PERENS (Open Source Strategy Advisor for Hewlett Packard) and TOM SCHWALLER (founder of Linux Magazin and a Linux Enterprise Specialist at IBM) both come from the free movement and are currently employed by large companies. GEORG GREVE (President of the Free Software Foundation Europe) aims to establish a free software business model in Europe. They will discuss the current relationship between a free social movement and large companies. In a knowledge environment supported by software, it is the elements of the design of programs that aide social processes of exchange. Napster made peer-to-peer protocols famous. ERIK MOELLER, who knows more about the P2P world than anyone in Germany, sees a genuine media revolution in P2P journalism and has put together a panel of three leading developers and maintainers of such self-organized news Web sites. Content Management Systems (CMS) help editors and communities gather and publish their information together. HERBERT A. MEYER (artop Institute, Humboldt University in Berlin) will moderate the panel during which eight selected free CMS projects will be introduced and examined to determine their usability. It has become clear that software is also of great cultural import. But why is it that a "software criticism" comparable to that of film or literature has not emerged? London theorist, artist and activist MATTHEW FULLER has put together a panel from the field of cultural studies, including MAURIZIO LAZZARATO, a researcher on communication, information technologies and immaterial labor who lives in Paris. No conference on software-based infrastructures can ignore the issues of security and privacy. A guest panel organized by the Heinrich Boell Foundation will address current issues arising from the introduction of the "digital signature".
*** "Intellectual Property" *** "Intellectual property is the legal form of the information society," writes law scholar Jamie Boyle. So philosophies of freedom are these days no longer nailed to church doors or announced by town callers from the castle tower, but instead take on the form of licenses, that is, contractual agreements regarding copyright. Against a background of the current discussion regarding the introduction of software patents in Europe, WOS 2 will examine their impact on business practices. FRITZ TEUFEL (Manager of the Intellectual Property Department of IBM Germany) will report on the experiences of a company that secures most of its income via license fees. DANIEL PROBST (Political Economist, Mannheim University) will shed light on the sense and nonsense of software patents from the standpoint of the political economy. A representative from the Frauenhofer Institute for System Technology and Innovation Research will present the previously unpublished results of a BMWi study on the use of patents in German software companies. TILL KREUTZER (Junior Lawyer at the copyright law firm Kukuk, Hamburg) and LAWRENCE LESSIG (Cyberlaw Expert, Stanford University) will discuss the recent EU Copyright Directive and its consequences on the open exchange of knowledge and public access. The anthropologist CHRISTOPHER KELTY of Rice University in Houston has organized two panels on the edgy relationship between free science and the industry it supports as well as on the marketing of knowledge in the first world and biodiversity in the third. Central themes of both panels are the contentious fields of biotechnology and genetic engineering.
*** Public Knowledge *** Education and research in schools and universities and the collections of knowledge in libraries, museums and archives have so far been seen as resources off limits to competition and available to anyone. The German Constitutional Court has ruled that public broadcasters are bound to provide "fundamental informational needs." Most believe that government should be transparent. At the same time, the pressures of empty public coffers and the lure of a global educational and knowledge market would appear to be opening the door to the commercial exploitation of public knowledge as a way out. But at what price to society? These questions are to be posed during the course of six panels by, among others, INGO RUHMANN (Project Leader for Schulnetz / IT WORKS, part of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research initiative Schools on the Net), THOMAS KRÜGER (President of the Federal Office for Political Education), HANSJÜRGEN GARSTKA (Privacy and Information Access Commissioner of the State of Berlin) and BRIGITTE ZYPRIES (Under Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, in charge of the eGovernment projects of the Federal Government). The head of the public network ARD, FRITZ PLEITGEN, has also been invited.
*** Open Infrastructures *** The foundations and infrastructures of the current order of knowledge systems are the focus of the fourth major theme of the conference. Standards serve the interoperability of people, machines and knowledge. The question arises here, too, as to how open or closed they are. Money is also a cultural convention, enabling processes of exchange among people. What would money that approaches the open exchange of free software look like? The question is at the center of a the panel "Open_Money", organized by FELIX STALDER (University of Toronto) and including KEITH HART (anthropologist and author of _The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World_) and MICHAEL LINTON (inventor of the LETS [Local Exchange Trading Systems] concept known in Germany as "Tauschringe" and an organizer of the Japanese project Openmoney.org). Free software is an example of the quality of collective intelligence, flying in the face of the common misconception that the highly complex questions of our time can only be addressed and answered by a few experts. A panel of representatives from a wide variety of disciplines examines the phenomenon. Participants include REINHARD DOEHL (theoretician and practitioner of intermedial and collaborative poetry), BRIAN McCONNELL (SETI@Home, San Francisco) and THOMAS MACHO (Professor of Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin). Finally, contemporary grand visions of a free society are to be presented. Among them are the GPL Society, introduced by STEFAN MERETZ and STEFAN MERTEN (both co-founders of oekonux.de) and the New Associationist Movement in Japan, presented by KENTA OHJI (currently teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris).
### CONFERENCE ### The three day conference Wizards of OS 2 addresses a broad audience interested in digital media culture and the future of the knowledge society. It will bring together about 50 German and international speakers and up to 1000 participants from a variety of fields including information technology, biotechnology, law, art, cultural studies, economics and politics. The languages of the conference are English and German. The main events will be simultaneously translated. Even before the conference, there will be a WOS panel at BerlinBETA on August 31st. Under the titel "Free Software Metropolis Berlin?", representatives from Berlin companies building their business modell on free software will be speaking about bridging the gap between movement and busines. Speakers are ANDREAS BOGK (Head of Research & Development, Convergence integrated media GmbH, Berlin), SEBASTIAN HETZE (Chair, Linux Information Systems AG, Berlin), STEPHAN RIEDEL (Managing Director, Cluster Labs GmbH, Berlin), a representative of the Berlin Senate for Economics and VOLKER GRASSMUCK (Wizards of OS).
### CONTACTS ### Press accreditation without forms via presse@wizards-of-os.org. If you would like to know more,
you can find up-to-date information at You can receive monthly updates by signing up to the mailinglist wos-announce@mikrolisten.de. Send a mail to majordom@eg-r.isp-eg.de with "subscribe wos-announce" in the body. Please address general questions to presse@wizards-of-os.org and questions on topics and organization to wos-crew@mikrolisten.de. If you no longer wish to receive any further information about Wizards of OS 2, please send a brief message to presse@wizards-of-os.org. Your address will then be removed from the list. Otherwise, you will receive two more press releases via this distribution list until October. Wizards of OS Thomas Thaler, WOS Press
***************************** Wizards of OS 2. Open Cultures & Free Knowledge organized by
in cooperation with: Chaos Computer Club Berlin (CCC), Debian Project, Institute for Legal Questions Concerning Open Source Software (ifrOSS), Bootlab e.V., LinuxTag, Berlin Unix User Group (BUUG), German Unix User Group (GUUG), the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Netzwerk Neue Medien, C-Base Berlin, Transmediale Berlin, V2_Laboratory for the Unstable Media Rotterdam, De Waag Society for Old and New Media Amsterdam, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Telepolis, Linux-Magazin, De:Bug, Mute and others. with friendly support from: Projekt Zukunft. Berlin in der Informationsgesellschaft (Future Project: Berlin in the Information Society), an initiative of the State of Berlin; Sicherheit in der Informationsgesellschaft (Security in the Information Society), an initiative of the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology; MiND ISP, Berlin; Institute for Time-based Media of the Academy of Arts in Berlin; Convergence integrated media, Berlin, and Internet Spezialisten EG (i.G.).
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last updated 01-05-25