[Fsfe-uk] ESF Solidarity Village report

[Tom Chance]

Hello,

I attended the Sunday session on "Creating the Commons" [1] in the Solidarity 
Village, part of the European Social Forum.

There weren't many people there, and the session was slightly disorganised. It 
kicked off with a live interview with Richard Stallman. But a video that he 
had sent two days ago, along with some prerecorded answers, hadn't been 
prepared, so we both missed this intro, and had to deal with an angry RMS as 
a result. About all that came of it was RMS criticising Debian for nitpicking 
re: Creative Commons licenses (he has no problem with requiring attribution).

The discussion that followed had some useful moments. There was a long 
discussion about ways for communities to build alternative enterprise models 
that would both compensate, encourage and help manage projects that the Free 
Software community won't, by scratching an itch, tackle. It was very relevant 
to the AFFS given the new grant scheme.

The crux of the discussion was this: a community like ours should recognise 
more forms of value than money, whilst recognising that money is fairly 
essential to our daily lives (for better or for worse). If the community 
could go beyond the Advogato model and have a tradeable, exhangeable currency 
based on values "in kind", be it money, code, project management, or whatever 
you might contribute, then it would have a valuable way of compensating, 
encouraging and managing "difficult" projects.

A lot of the discussion went off into economics, including different ways of 
bringing stakeholders into the equation and allowing people to invest "in 
kind". I won't go into that any more, unless people want me to.

And there were some sparodic tech discussions about online voting systems, 
including some project that's modifying GNU mailman, and cryptography, which 
went over my head :)

Anyway, the group LETS who already do a currency scheme offered to prepare a 
presentation for the AFFS, or just the committee, on how the AFFS could 
implement this as part of its grants scheme. I was trying to get them to be 
more specific and pragmatic, and they were genuinly interested. I've got 
contact details of one of their people, if it's wanted. Otherwise have a look 
at http://lets.net

And that was, more or less, all we talked about. There was very little 
discussion about Free Software and Creative Commons themselves, nor about how 
they could realistically be supported without resorting to the status quo of 
trying to fit the licensing schemes into the traditional business models, 
which disappointed me, but there you go. Oh, and the only bit of Free 
Software we saw was the icon for Mozilla Firefox on someone's Win98 icon bar!

Regards,
Tom


[1] http://letslink.org/solidarity/events/041016-creating.htm