* Information Society can be great, and Free Software is showing the way

When we think of Information Society we risk thinking one single, uniform
world where everyone is connected and is accessing the same contents in the
same way.

Free software is showing us that things can go differently, and that an
Information Society may exist in which local realities are not only respected,
but are also a key part of his value.

The presentation outlines some general concept, showing how creativity spreads,
how information evolves.  It talks about cooperation, and about Free Software
as an alphabet.  It shows lots of examples of what's really happening already,
and what could happen at any time.

60 mins (political)

Tell two stories:

00:00
The history of information society
 - Gutemberg
    - Mass communication
    - Luther
	 - Spread of information: Information can get out of convents and
		universities / Censorship (the state cannot monopolise the media)
	Why information is this magic and powerful?
	How information works
	 - Apples
	 - Metcalfe
 - Press
 - Fotografia
 - Marconi
    - Radio
   (no cost for paper)
	 - Many sources of information / Propaganda
	 - Manufacturing of truth (Orson Welles (or whoever) and the War of the Worlds)
 - Frères Lumière
    - Cinema
	(moving images)
 - TV
   (no need for a special place)
	 - Media concentration
	 - Media can be monopolised using money, creating more effective ways of communication
	 - Shaping of reality, Manufacturing of truth, Manufacturing of consent / Possibility of communicating complex things effectively, quickly, to very wide amounts of people
       - Corporate media
		 - Information control
 - Internet
   (many to many)
	 - Alternative media
	 - Online activity
	 - Spam
	 - Hoaxes
	 - Censorship raises again (as the state cannot monopolise the tecnhnology,
		like in the case of Gutemberg)
	 - IP and TCPA to avoid democratisation of technology
 
30:00

The history of free software
  (it's a nice story, but doesn't tell much: it's only about software and
   people.  Information is a story much more difficult to tell: there are very
   nice stories, but they are kept well hidden)

 - Software was free: the beginnings
 - Software started to become a business

 - The revolution of the 4 freedoms (revolution because of the affirmation of
	the second 2 points)
    - First 2: freedom
    - Second 2: affirmation of freedom
    - My 1: freedom is about doing nice things, otherwise you don't want to assert it
      (and all regimes are based on a widespread philosophy of sexual
      repression, so that if you don't want to affirm nice things, you don't
      want to affirm anything at all)

 - Short history of free software
   (centered on expansion of the cooperating community)
	 - Cooperation among top university hackers
	 - Hacker community widens
	 - Community expands internationally
	 - Community expands to non-hackers
	 - Community expands to diverse people (handicap)
	The structure of the free software communities always tried to change to
	make cooperation possible
	 - Newsletters
	 - Mediators
	 - User groups
	 - Diversification of user groups

 - The dialectics behind free software
	 - Global cooperation  [Globalisation]
	    - I want other people to do part of my work!
		 - Tendence to adapt problems to technology
		 - Enormous anvances of technology to solve very new kinds of problems
		 - Scale economy
		 - Sharing
		 - Exchange and growth of information
		 - Global innovation
		 - No personalisation
		 - Omogenisation

	 - Extreme customization  [Localisation]
	    - I work mainly for myself!
		 - Respect of identities
		 - Addressing needs
		 - Instead of adapting problems to technology,
			solving real problems
		 - Situated software
		 - Local creativity
		 - Wide scale sharing is difficult

 - How can these things go together?
   Local creativity -> Global innovation
   (bridge among the two made possible by free software)
    - Yuwei's mailing list examples
	 - Cooperation, sharing, asserting the freedom is the key
	 - Free Software has always been doing this: that's at its basis!

 - Creativity from difference
	 - Culture (french people create lots of translation infrastructure, because
		they're so attached to french)
    - Handicap (speech synthesis used elsewhere)
    - Other special needs (simputer and illiterate interfaces)
    - How all this can go together (speech for people driving, dasher for small
      devices, illiterate interfaces for cognitively impaired, babies,
      keyboardless computing...)

 - Free Software as an alphabet
    - Unesco Friends of the World Treasure
    - http://www.fwtunesco.org/atmlist/freesoftware.html

 - Debian
 - Debian Universe
 - The possibility of Custom Debians
    - Skolelinux
	 - Debian-NP
 - Possibility to foster new inter-local-culture exchanges and cooperation

 - Other examples:
    - Proliferation of derived Linux distros
    - gcc as an example of a global tool that everyone uses
    - Simputer, TiVO and other examples of localization of free software

Possible future

 - (spread around a "what could happen": give ideas to politicians:
    - Cooperation between Brazil and Spain (distros socially oriented)
    - Cooperation between Brazil and India (need for new kinds of localized
      software, because they share unique local realities)
    - Brazilian government could fund local software inside Debian, and make it
      easy for brazilian implementors to create CDDs with it
    - Cooperation between Brazil and Norway (skolelinux)

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