From:	 "Volker Grassmuck" <vgrass@rz.hu-berlin.de>
To:	 letters@lwn.net
Subject: announcement: Wizards of OS 2
Date:	 Sun, 19 Aug 2001 20:14:09 +0200


Wizards of OS 2 
Open Cultures & Free Knowledge 

International Conference at the 
House of World Cultures Berlin 
October 11 - 13, 2001

http://wizards-of-os.org/ 


"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:
http://mikro.org/Events/OS/wos2/topics.html 

An ongoing, updated list of speakers can be found here: 
http://mikro.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 ### 

For registration please go to
http://mikro.org/Events/OS/wos2/registration-e.html

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, and questions on topics and organization to 
wos-crew@mikrolisten.de. 

yours 

Wizards of OS 

Thomas Thaler, WOS Press 



***************************** 

Wizards of OS 2. Open Cultures & Free Knowledge 

organized by 

mikro e.V., Berlin 
http://mikro.org/ 

the Federal Office for Political Education, Bonn 
http://www.bpb.de/ 

and the Working Group on Informatics & Society at Humboldt University Berlin 
http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/ 



in cooperation with: 

Chaos Computer Club Berlin (CCC), Debian Project, Institute for Legal Questions 
Concerning Open Source Software (ifrOSS), Bootlab e.V., LinuxTag e.V., 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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   Wizards of OS 2 -- offene Kulturen & Freies Wissen
   October 11-13, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin
   http://wizards-of-os.org

   http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck

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