Wizards of OS on a Forking Brick Road (On the Strategies Panel, Wizards of OS conference, Berlin, October 13th)

On the panel that finally brought together the many threads of a conference without a focus

The Strategies Panel, Wizards of OS conference, Berlin, October 13th, 2001

After a few days of bouncing schizophrenically between discussions on genome mapping, Content Management Systems (CMS) software, P2P journalism, Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) and nearly anything else you'd care to free associate, the Strategies panel was like a cool hand of synthesis to a fevered brow. By simply posing the 'what is to be done' question, panelists and audience alike were forced to define what relationship all these threads had to each other. Despite the us-versus-them set up of the room with moderator Volker Grassmuck and panelists (Thorsten Schilling, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, Sebastian Hetze and James Love) up on stage, such hierarchical divisions were refreshingly and appropriately dissolved as people finally got to grips with the concept of the 'public domain' and its relationship to the Free Software movement.

After a zealot from the German equivalent to the Electronic Frontier Foundation stood up and started proselytising over the integral link between freedom and Free Software, the debate really kicked off. Is free information per se constitutive of 'freedom' - whatever that might be - or is it something that, more modestly, promotes the common good of society in the same way as public space or health care? On this question Geert Lovink (co-founder of the nettime mailing list) was insistent: we must stop this nonsense about the indispensability of Free Software to freedom which is both a treacherous and unphilosophical path, and focus instead on slotting the demands for an information commons into the pre-existing framework of 'the public domain'.

Putting it another way, if freedom - as Volker Grassmuck, echoing Georg Lukacs, explained - is an activity not a static condition to be granted or retracted, then the availability, or not, of Free Software is just one ingredient in its elusive recipe. In conclusion, as Thorsten Schilling (of the German Federal Office of Political Education) elaborated afterwards in the lobby, just as we need public roads to ensure a basic and essential degree of movement and activity, so do we need publicly available information and open source software to facilitate an essential degree of intellectual and creative activity - a publicly protected social operating system, so to speak, for the information age. This is a quite different suggestion to the idea that free software is somehow integral to freedom with a capital 'F'. Finally all those panels on 'P2P journalism', biotechnology, open structures for exchange and public education were starting to cohere in my mind.

The latter half of the session was taken up with the somewhat circular but provocative question of how to convince 'the powers that be' of the merits of open source software and the dangers of escalating intellectual property legislation - both crucial factors in the development of a social operating system. Once again, Schilling was to the point: 'get some good lobbyists' he shrugged. Then a brave student on a suicide mission stood up and actually suggested creating an 'elite' (ELITE!!!! I nearly swallowed my gum) foundation dedicated to the promotion of the public domain. So shocking was this idea to many that they stayed silent. While for others, such as James Love (director of the Consumer Project on Technology) and Tim Hubbard (head of human sequence analysis at the Sanger Centre), the idea of creating an international organisation along the lines of Amnesty International seemed sensible. In a world of professional politics, a professionalised opposition is indispensable - supposedly. For a few moments direct action seemed like little more than a distant memory, as we all started to imagine silver tongued and pinstripe suited hackers whispering the letters 'O' and 'S' into the ears of government. But this moment passed and the audience recovered its senses, soon seeing how separating out an elite senator class from the activist prolls might backfire in a big way. But despite the idea's swift demise, contemplating such a sinister organisation helped precipitate the last and final debate of the session. Under what slogan would this satanically hierarchical NGO operate?

Admittedly, at this point, one became all too acutely aware of why these men [for men they sadly *all* were] are employed in research, the civil services or consumer rights lobbying and not at Saatchi's! Arguing, like the children of No Logo we've all become, that it is important to come up with a brand - maybe a word, as Love suggested, that nobody recognises and actually has no meaning (?!) - there then ensued a feeble stream of suggestions. Riffing on recent comparisons of the information commons to ecology, words such as 'info-cology' or 'I-cology' were floated. It felt a bit like watching your parents try to 'get down' on the dance floor.

In the final analysis, and after much futile 'brain storming' one was left with the sense that there's nothing wrong with the term 'public domain' itself. So what if it has a specific meaning in US copyright law, designating the end destination of intellectual property after its copyright has run out. 'Public domain' is a familiar term, easy to get your head around and fittingly close to 'public space' or 'public services'. And wouldn't it be more effective to use a 'brand' to unify a network of disparate organisations and individuals than to create a slick NGO to schmooze its way down the halls of power and forget what it stands for on the way? As we know by now, thanks to our spiritual leader Naomi, the global brand space painstakingly created by corporations is there to be appropriated by anti-corporate brands. What could be more poetically just than infecting the brand space, which has played such a central role in the privatisation of language, with its nemesis - the demand for an information commons.

http://wizards-of-os.org

Josephine Berry <josie@metamute.com>