[Nettime-bold] Wizards of OS News

["Volker Grassmuck" <vgrass@rz.hu-berlin.de>]

Dear all,

Just one week to go before Wizards of OS 2 begins. Everybody on the team is busy making final arrangements for catering, computing and networking, partying, and all the other things you need to see about in order to provi
de the framework for a dense, creative, comfortable and fun three days. Time to update you on the latest news.

We are happy to confirm that there will be simultaneous translation of German (and one French) presentations into English. At WOS1, the non-German speaking participants were excluded from a significant part of the confere
nce. We learned our lessons and, most of all, we managed to gather the resources to make WOS2 truly internationally accessible.

The panels and the schedule are pretty stable by now. There might be a last-minute addition to a panel or two, and maybe a few small changes in the workshops and tutorials. BTW, if you are thinking of presenting something
 within the context of the WOS, we can still fit in smaller workshops (10-15 people) and BOF sessions.


What's new with the panels?

Erik Moeller's panel "P2P: Collaborative Writing" has had a recent addition: Timothy Lord, editor of slashdot.org. Ingo Ruhmann and Werner Roth, on the panel on open source software and content in schools, have been joine
d by Hans-Peter Prenzel, who runs OpenWebSchool.de. The university panel will have an additional written contribution by Christoph Oehler, Professor Emeritus for sociology and research in higher education at the Gesamthoc
hschule Kassel.

The "Open Source Content Management Systems" panel has veiled itself in secrecy until recently. What Herbert Meyer is now presenting there looks like a serious free CMS summit, the first of its kind, to my knowledge. Not 
only will the seven CMSs deemed most interesting after careful scrutiny be presented on the panel and in individual tutorials, and not only will their representatives discuss different approaches to common design issues i
n a joint workshop, but this track will also be the launch of an even more ambitious project. "Free Online Systems" (FOS) <http://fos.bpb.de/> will be a demo and evaluation environment for, well, online systems under a fr
ee license. At the WOS2, the FOS team (Thomax Kaulmann, Heiko Recktenwald and Herbert Meyer) will conduct a study of four selected CMSs. They will collect as much multimedia content as they can get their hands on, and pro
cess it four times in parallel to see how the CMSs compare in usage and performance.

On the "Standards" panel, we have been hoping to not only address technical but also classification standards. Therefore we are happy to see the contribution from Susanne Dobratz from the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). "
Open Music" is now being edited by Sascha Koesch from WOS partner De:Bug. It will cover a range of issues from the theory and practice of musical collaboration to copyright and licensing.

"Capitalism and Beyond" has had its name changed to "What Else? Thoughts on Societies and Capitalisms on the Net and Elsewhere." Paschutan Buzari, the moderator of this panel, has brought in a third perspective to be adde
d to those of the GPL society and NAM: Yann Moulier Boutang, economist and editor of the publication "Multitudes" in Paris.

As we learned only yesterday, Brigitte Zypries, Under Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, has been kept so busy by the current security situation that she will not allow be able to speak at WOS. eGov
ernment was one of the most difficult panels to begin with. All the invitations we sent to potential speakers we had hoped to include have not worked out. I don't think it's because governments don't like wizards. Well, o
k, maybe some like them less than others. My guess is that governments are too busy right now with themselves, with fighting terrorism, with elections and the like. Anyway, dropping the eGovernment panel allows us to give
 more space to the panel on Freedom of Information which has been joined by Manfred Redelfs, Head of the Research & Investigations Unit of Greenpeace Germany.

You've probably noticed that a few other people have also disappeared from the list of previously confirmed speakers. Some of the cancellations were due to health and other personal reasons, but some were also indirectly 
linked to the events of September 11. Just as the whole world has been impacted by the attacks in New York and Washington, so, too, has this conference. In particular, the sessions on security and on digital signatures wi
ll address some of the implications for open and anonymous communications and for the information environment as a whole.


Specials

The WOS 2 is not all talks and discussions. During the opening reception on Thursday, Matt Fuller will invite everybody to take part in a Human Cellular Automaton. The performance is based on John Conway's Game of Life, w
ith each cell's state depending on those of its neighbors, with patterns changing in every generation. People who participated the two earlier times that Matt organized such an automaton say it's a lot of fun, like a Mexi
can Wave in two-dimensions. So if you're there, we hope you'll join in.

On Friday and Saturday nights, there will be lounge parties organized by WOS partners De:Bug and C-Base. Please visit the specials page on our website for line-up and other information on these.

Another special that I would like to point out is Ganesha's Project. This group of young activists will bring computers, free software and computer literacy to a school in Nepal. They are still looking for donations of co
mputers to take there. So if you have a 133 MHz machine collecting dust in your basement, please do bring it along. <http://www.ganeshas-project.org/>


CD-ROM Pack, WOS2 Special Edition

And yet another highlight will be the special edition: debian GNU/linux 3.0 (pre) plus. 
This set of 6 CDs contains brand-new versions of Debian GNU/Linux and of Knoppix, 
plus the complete proceedings of WOS1, July 1999, with all the video recordings, as 
well as the manuscripts or transcripts of all presentations and panel discussions.

Thanks for this project go to Frank Ronneburg for the debian release and for mastering 
the whole set, to Klaus Knopper for the fresh release of Knoppix, and to Bernd 
Sommerfeld for publishing it with Fachbuchhandlung Lehmanns. The set will be selling 
for half price during the conference. The savings you'll get might be a reason in itself to 
come to WOS2 ;)


Center for the Public Domain grant for WOS

And, since we're talking money, a word on the funding of WOS. Don't worry, I won't 
bother you with the hair-raising financial ups and downs of the WOS 2, but I do want to 
mention that we are very proud to have received a grant from the Center for the Public 
Domain.

The Center, formerly known as Red Hat Center, is a philanthropic foundation based in 
Durham, North Carolina, dedicated to the preservation of a healthy and robust public 
domain. Through grants, original research, conferences and collaborative programs, 
the Center seeks to call attention to the importance of the public domain and to spur 
effective, practical solutions and responses. Its work is animated by the conviction that 
new legal regimes, social institutions and transparent technologies must be created to 
fortify the information commons.

In other words, it has basically the same aims as the Wizards of OS. The Center is a 
natural partner for the WOS, and we're very proud to be among the academic and 
activist institutions that Bob Young, James Boyle, John Gilmore, Larry Lessig and the 
others on the board of directors have decided to support. Do browse around this great 
network of activities, and the valuable resources that the Center itself maintains. 
<http://www.centerforthepublicdomain.org>

Of course, all of our other sponsors are doing wonderful things as well, and also 
deserve your attention ;)



What to bring?

Your laptop and your wireless card, if you like -- there will be a wave LAN throughout 
the House of World Cultures -- lots of ideas on how to improve and promote open 
culturres and free knowledge and, of course, an open mind.


Live Streaming

We hope to see you all at the WOS2. For those of you who will not be able to make it 
to Berlin, there will be live video streams of at least parts of the panels. Please watch 
the WOS website for announcements of current streams. And for those who will not 
have the time to watch the streams either, the video documentation of all the sessions 
of the two main tracks will be available for on-demand viewing after the conference.

Another way of remotely participating in the conference is via the web forum that 
BUUG (the Berlin Unix User Group) and WOS provides for presenting and discussing 
materials relevant to the WOS mindspace. <http://www.buug.de/wosindex.php>


See you there or on the net

yours
Volker



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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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