Last day of Linux World Joberg

Four Day trade shows are alot of fun

The last day of four days of Linux World Joberg wraps up today and we have managed to conduct 112 exams and we hope to conduct two more examlabs today after alot of horse trading yesterday. We managed to mark the 102 and 202 exams and we will see how time permits to mark the 201 before I leave on sunday

Our booth continues to be a very popular place with our toaster and the two most popular distro requests have been Suse and Ubuntu. Interesting that Fedora was requested the least.

The Go Open Source booth has produced a television program which I will be burning on the LATP resource CD

We had meetings with the Show organizers gaining insights on the significance of Linux in the convention scene.

Glenn

Presentation on Creative Commons -Digital copyright alternatives

While open source software often captures the spotlight in the digital universe, the global sharing of information is not as common a debate, particularly the issues around copyright.

Marcus Borfreund, co-founder of the Creative Commons in Canada, gave an interesting presentation during the workshops at the conference Saturday, pointing out a fascinating alternative to the “all rights reserved” copyright currently available to anyone who publishes on the web.

The Creative Commons offers a customizable copyright where some rights are reserved, but not all. This provides a mid-point between the absolute protection of the current copyright laws and the no rights reserved or public domain scenario.

Creative Commons is available in 69 countries, starting in the United States. It is legally enforceable and is mainly a virtual movement.

Considering the tone set by Professor Jean-Claude Guedon, a copyright expert from the University of Montreal, the alternatives being offered by Creative Commons is vital. He characterized the current atmosphere around digital copyright as a “war” being waged between those who wish to impose traditional copyright in the digital world. In some countries, like those in Europe and the United States, intellectual property rights extend 75 years. In Canada, it is 50 years. He lamented the constraints this placed on creativity and innovation, urging the universal accessibility to information, while protecting ownership.

UNESCO/WSIS Day II:

UNESCO/WSIS Day II:

The "Cabinet room" Board table is a mess of cables and laptops. Throughout the room are small knots of people hunched over pieces of paper engaged in vigorous debate. At the end of the Board room table four women "editors" are speaking French and English simultaneously.

Robert Guerra, who as chair of the North American Committee of the WSIS Civil Society caucus is at the centre of this chaos, is in a discussion on some finer policy point with one person, pasting and cutting paragraphs on his laptop, and issuing instructions to the editors at the other end of the table. As Evan and I enter the room Robert interrupts his multi-tasking to say definitively to us: "two sentences". This starts a debate:

"No, one sentence." says one of the editors.
"No, two words."says another.
"No, an acronym!" says another with some mirth.
"How about a few well-crafted syllables," responds Evan, smiling.
"Done!" The editors say in unison.
The room erupts in laughter.

This is the drafting room of the conference civil society communique. Robert explains they have 10 pages thus far of policy statements and principles from civil society advocates which they must whittle down to two pages and then translate before the evening ends. There will be others coming to this room after Evan and I.

Evan and I sit down to the table and begin to read the draft document. Every other paragraph has references to open source for this, free software for that, even Linux. For gender issues, for education, for ICT, for community development, for human rights, for...well you name it. Amongst all this is a blank spot which reads: "insert free software/open source software statement".

Evan and I look up from our reading at Robert. He smiles. Evan says, "I'm going to get my laptop".

It could be a long night. Sigh.

Clearly, there is larger story here.

(For more on Day II see FUD on my personal blog)

LPI at Linux World Joberg South Africa

I arrived at the Sandton Convention Centre, Joberg, South Africa( Notice the correct spelling of Centre) after 10 o clock today.

This is the first Linux World Expo in South Africa http://www.linuxworldexpo.co.za/

The event was organized with the leading distros in attendance with large booths and a nice Linux Community Centre.

Mark Shuttleworth, Shuttleworth Foundation, Canonical and much more conducted the keynote address today

For detailed articles on the booth exhibits, please visit http://www.tectonic.co.za for articles by Jason Norwood-Young

LPI Booth:
We have a share booth space with Shuttleworth. If you could see the pictures you will know why we are the hit of the show.

We had a FREEDOM TOASTER run by Jaco Kroon, Volunteer for Shuttleworth and a day job with the local university is a Assistant System Administrator oversaw the Shuttleworth Freedom Toaster which at the request of the booth attendee we managed to burn over 400 CD's burned with the Toaster at the booth. He offered a choice of SUSE, Slackware, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Geento, Knoppix, Fedora, K12, FreeBSD, Whitebox all burned for the viewer's pleasure For more information http://www.freedomtoaster.org/

At the end of the week we will have an idea was was the most popular.

Meetings:
I had an excellent meeting with Hayward Rose, HP, Icommunity Information program who will be ramping up an extensive LATP community based intiative with LPI. See appendix for more information

Examlab:
Tomorrow we plan on having for the four examlabs for 148 exam seatings for more details visit http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=440

Thats all

Glenn


Appendix

Background information on HP I Community Program

Community Program:
Historically the Mogalakwena Municipality in the Limpopo Province of the Republic of South Africa (RSA) has had limited access to information and communication technology (ICT) solutions. Located 3 hours north of Johannesburg, Mogalakwena has approximately 300,000 people and is eagerly hoping to increase literacy rates, socio-economic development and AIDS alleviation.

In September of 2002, Hewlett-Packard Chairwoman and CEO Carly Fiorina presented the Mogalakwena i-community as a legacy project from the UN World Summit on Sustainability to RSA President Thabo Mbeki. HP is working with the national, provincial and municipal governments to jointly develop an ecosystem of partnerships with independent local and international third parties to strategically deploy an ICT infrastructure aimed at addressing the challenges identified above.

HP's vision for the Mogalakwena i-community is to help create a thriving self-sustaining economic community where ICT solutions are strategically deployed to significantly enhance economic and social development and thereby improve many facets of it's citizens’ lives. The details of this vision were collaboratively developed by HP, government partners in the province and municipality, key partners and the Mogalakwena community stakeholders.

Through nurturing of the partnership between the Government, HP and the partners, the goal is to deliver upon the objectives derived from the visioning session.

The i-community project was kicked off in September 2002 with the signing of memorandums of understanding between Limpopo province, Mogalakwena municipality, and HP and is progressing rapidly per the plan. Each participant is responsible for meeting their commitments and delivering upon the plan. The participants will respectively invest personnel and resources as may be necessary for the establishment and success of the effort.

About a HP i-community:
An " i-community " is a community where Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions are strategically deployed for sustainable economic and social development of the community. The processes, learnings and technology solutions from each i-community will be the basis for future replication in several underserved regions around the world.

i-community in Mogalakwena Municipality
Republic of South Africa
Brief Overview

President Mbeki commends HP for contributing to World Summit success

Attending a press event immediately following a World Summit on Sustainable Development panel on “The Future of Multilaterialism,” in which HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina participated, South Africa President Thabo Mbeki spoke about how pleased he was with how smooth the Summit was running. He stated that much of the Summit’s success could be attributed to HP’s support and involvement. President Mbeki added that he only realized the scope of HP’s commitment shortly before the summit began.

“A few days before the summit opened officially, I was telling Carly I was getting a bit nervous about our state of preparedness, and so I thought I’d do a quick round of all the venues just to see how ready we were to receive people. I started at Nasrec and walked into a room and it was just banks and banks and banks of computers. So I went up to each one and they were Hewlett-Packard computers. That is the first time I actually realized how big the contribution was”.

“I really do want to say thank you very much indeed to Carly, to everyone from Hewlett-Packard, and to the leadership of Hewlett-Packard locally. It’s been critical to ensuring the success that everyone is talking about,” he said.

Limpopo Province boosted by HP i-community Public-Private Partnership Announcement

Hewlett-Packard also launched a new public-private partnership that embodies the spirit of the Summit. The rural community of Mogalakwena in Limpopo Province is the beneficiary of South Africa’s first i-community, an HP emerging market solution aimed at providing real business benefits to local communities. The formal announcement of this partnership was made by Carly Fiorina and President Mbeki on Tuesday, September 3 at a standing-room-only event held at the Ubuntu Village.

As a legacy project derived from the Summit, several heads of state and local politicians attended the launch of the Mogalakwena i-community project. This project is similar to others HP has launched in Kuppam, India and Houston, Texas.

The i-community project aims to create sustainable economic and social development opportunities in underserved areas through the use of information and communication technology (ICT) solutions. It also aims to improve literacy, create jobs, and use ICT to expand access to government, education, and health services. HP is working with the local community to design new technology solutions that will meet community needs.

“With 90 percent of the world’s population currently technologically-excluded, our goal is to invent sustainable and scalable solutions to address the challenges of the global digital divide,” said Carly Fiorina. “By partnering with selected communities and understanding what new products and services are needed, we can tackle the really tough problems of sustainable rural development.”

Debra Dunn, HP senior vice president for corporate affairs, who also attended the special ceremony, stated “no country or company has the entire solution to address the challenge of sustainable development. At HP, we believe that the creation of stronger and deeper partnerships offers greater potential for achieving true sustainable development success.”


Fiorina addressing a crowd of more than 500 invited guests and commented that the “I” in i-community does not stand for the Internet – although the Internet is involved. Instead, the “I” in i-community stands for “inclusion.”


She added that “Instead of simply committing resources - sending money or computers or equipment - and wishing them well, we are actually committing some of our best talent to targeted communities around the world, putting them in place for up to three years, and charging them with the responsibility of working with local citizens to set goals and create solutions for the challenges that the community prioritises.”

[sidebar] The Mogalakwena i-community effort began with a three-year memoranudum of agreement with the provincial and local governments signed just prior to the Summit. In the i-community, HP’s emerging market solutions team works with local community members to develop solutions to improve literacy, create jobs and expand access to government, education and health services.

Limpopo Province and Mogalakwena Municipality were selected, “because of the vision and commitment of the leadership and community stakeholders to partner with the private sector to invent new tools and services that will create social and economic growth,” says Maureen Conway, HP vice-president for e-inclusion and emerging market solutions.

“Over time, the Mogolakwena i-community partnership will become the foundation that will make us equal partners in the global village,” said Premier Ngoake Ramathlodi of Limpopo.

“I believe the commitment of the Mogalakwena community will drive the success of the i-community project not just for ourselves but for the future generations,” said Bob Mmola, Mayor of Mogalakwena Municipality.
[end sidebar]
Fiorina, also a member of Mbeki’s Presidential International Advisory Council on Information Society and Development, noted “ “If we've learned anything here this week, we've learned that financial capital alone is not the greatest wealth multinationals can bring to the developing world - its human capital. It's experience and knowledge, and the ability to transmit that as capacity building. At a time when the challenges to sustainable development are so great, and the urgency to achieve is so profound, we need to apply all of our best talents to solving those problems”.

[sidebar] HP’s technology sponsorship of the Johannesburg World Summit
As the Summit’s lead technology sponsor, HP partnered with The Johannesburg World Summit Company (JOWSCO) to provide infrastructure technology, support services, and website solutions to integrate the Summit’s 39 venues and create a rich virtual environment for the dissemination of news and dialogue via www.josummit.com.

HP technology networked 39 separate Summit sites which involved more than 2300 computers, 128 servers, notebooks, scanners, printers and switches at various venues across Johannesburg. After the Summit, some of the equipment will be donated to the iCommunity project in Limpopo.

HP’s was especially pleased that all technology aspects of the Summit ran smoothly. With an army of HP engineers working 24 by 7 to support the project, backup measures were in place should there have been any real-time problems.

In the end, the 300 PCs running the Summit press room, the HP backbone infrastructure that handled all delegate and press credentialing for more than 40,000 attendees and the Summit website – which received more than half-a-million page views per day with visitors staying an average of 10 minutes per stay – none of the technology aspects of the Summit experienced any downtime.

Fiorina stressed that a global economy that is creating prosperity for millions will not be sustainable if billions are left behind. While the computer industry’s products are affordable right now to about 10 percent of the world, “we know that a good part of our long-term growth and success will come from the other 90 percent of the world that are on the outside looking in today. People we help today may very well be our partners, our customers, and maybe even our employees in the future. We see this as a critical and necessary long-term investment in our own future success.”

Web Networks as a socially responsible entrepreneur

Oliver Zielke, director of Web Networks, said his organization develops web sites for socially-committed organizations. Using content management software it designs, it assist groups who do not have the resources to otherwise publish a web presence. he hopes the technology his group develops can be replicated elsewhere and assist groups around the world.

CEFRIO

A lengthy presentation was done on CEFRIO, a $28 million project in Quebec aimed at providing organizational research, developing strategic knowledge and information about the use of information technology.
President Monique Charbonneau described the numerous aspects of the more than 200 projects the organization has sponsored.

Acadian communities benefit from Smart Communities

Rather than describing this as a technical exercise, Denis Porier, executive director of a Smart Community project in New Brunswick, said it was truly al social project. As a grossroots movement, the participants worked hard to develop local expertise to create sustainable projects for rural development using technology.

Maps and democracy

Democracy and government accountability rely on informed citizens and civil society organizations, says Carleton Professor Tracy Laurault.
She works at the Geomatics and Cartography Research Centre, where research into mapping technology and digital archiving takes place. It looks at the relations of geographic features and makes them available on the web.

Call for solidarity

“We must work together,” Borfreund said, in wrapping up.
Leibovitch reiterated his call for standards. He expressed his dismay for this concept is left out of WSIS documents.

Posts from Access to knowledge panel

The previous posts show how one-sided this group is within the debate.
There are no representatives from the relevant business community. It is crucial for civil society and business to talk to each other for ultimate success, it would seem.
There should be discourse, not singing to the choir.

A range of alternatives for copyright

There are an array of options being offered to those who wish to copyright information by using the Creative Commons, says Marcus Borfreund, driving force behind the Canadian version.
The Creative Commons enables authors to have a copyright licence that provides is customized and not as restrictive as the current all rights reserved copyright.

Canada behind in adoption of open source software

Canada has a role to play and the world will not wait, says Evan Leibovitch, president of LPI.
In his presentation, he called on Canadian government to advocate for open source and demand the creation of open standards.
Leibovitch called on officials to stregthen the language of the Geneva statement to embrace open source.

Revolution advocated

Jean-Claude Guedon, professor at the University of Montreal, and an international expert on access to knowledge, said resistance to restrictions to copyright legislation is essential.
He pointed to the significant role of the open source community in redefining copyright laws, in particular, the transfer of rights. The freeware model is good because it maintains ownership and it provides universal access, he says.
He promoted a guerrilla war, saying knowledge can no longer be an issue of property. A new system need to be developed with flexibility rather than the current one-size-fits-all.

Day 1: Winnipeg WSIS Consultations

Day 1: Canadian Commission for UNESCO/WSIS Civil Society Program, Winnipeg, Canada

So there's Evan with proverbial penguin tie standing in front of our LPI booth waxing eloquent on the virtues of linux and open source (and condemning the evil perpetrators of FUD) to a bewildered and wide-eyed knot of 7 NGO types. Behind this small impromtu audience stand a couple of people from the Prairie Linux User's Group and the University of Sherbrooke LUG grinning from ear to ear.

The free Ubuntu CDs are a big hit ;-)

Because its just a little crowded I stand away from all the group proudly decked out in my WSIS LPI Delegation t-shirt emblazoned with a huge rookery of penguins.

As my allegiance is obvious the afternoon's moderator from the Canadian Commission for UNESCO approaches me and says quietly "You're playing to the converted here."

I want to say to him: "Oh yes and IBM, Novell, HP, and other civil society organizations like that" but think better of it and say instead: "Well they were all converts until after the Paris Prepcom round of WSIS. Then, well, we all know what happened". I smile. He doesn't quite know what to say and backs away from me--he obviously doesn't want to get into that kind of discussion at the moment.

After all he has just spent the afternoon trying to defend the indefensible and it would appear, no one, ok almost no one is happy about it. At least not from civil society. It must be tough being a diplomat.

Sigh. Such is our highlight from the first day of this "consultation".

During the afternoon orientation session Evan almost falls out of his chair in disbelief when some really nice people say that they were pleasantly suprised with the amazing results of WSIS I. Evan frequently shakes his head and often with a heavy sigh just removes his translation earphones.

The afternoon orientation session is dominated by irate human rights advocates and journalists who are justifiably outraged at the prospect of WSIS II being held in Tunis. There is a heated exchange between one journalist and a Tunis representative.

So here we are handing out free Ubuntu CDs (courtesy of Mark Shuttleworth whom Glenn Mcknight met in Australia) and we are a BIG hit.
Evan doesn't speak until Saturday and already the representatives of the Canadian Civil Society have approached us for our policy recommendations for a position paper that will be released later in the weekend.

Still that evening over dinner Evan wonders out loud "what are we doing here". I remind him that its the weekend and he could be home painting the house in preparation for his upcoming move instead.

Sigh.

Still its refreshing. The representatives from the local LUGS are marching about the room enthusiastically engaging anyone in discussion with an embarassing enthusiasm. Representatives from a wide variety of organizations approach us quietly and in co-conspirator tones ask "Do you know what Microsoft is doing at the UN. Or the Global Knowledge Partnership"? Yes, we do. They admit apologetically for their Microsoft branding and funding. Deans of colleges and Universities ask earnest questions about how to become training partners.

And the Ubuntu Linux CDs just fly off the table. :-)

Upstairs, Downstairs: a Retrospective on the World Summit of the Information Society

(by Evan Leibovitch, LinuxWorld Magazine, January 2004)

The World Summit of the Information Society, held mid-December in Geneva, held out the promise that the nations of the world could agree on innovative and effective policies on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The conference, sponsored by the United Nations and the International Telecommunications Union, has attempted to portray itself as laying the groundwork for an ICT equivalent of the 1997 Kyoto Accord. More...

A listserv discussion regarding sessions

Civil Society organizations have set up a listserv with comments on the Winnipeg conference.

There is also a public wiki for posting policy recommendations that will be incorporated into a civil society communique during the conference (although there is a note on the opening page warning that the wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties)

Finally there is the ongoing WSIS civil society plenary listserv.

CJFE protests harassment of Tunisian journalists

As the conference gets underway, the CJFE sent out a press release protesting the choice of Tunis as the site for the second phase of WSIS in November after journalist Lotfi Hajji is being harrassed. There are more details about the incident involving Mr. Hajji at the Index on Censorship news page. There is also further information at the WSIS e commons

Opening session

The orientation session on WSIS began with a review of the main themes and ended with an expression of the Canadian government's optimism over the process to date in preparation for the second phase to take place in Tunis in November.

Ridha Guellouz gave opening remarks, laying the foundation for the balance of the weekend's activities in Winnipeg for the conference titled Paving the Road to Tunis - WSIS II: The Views of Canada's Civil Society on the Geneva Plan of Action and the Prospects for Phase II.

Franciose-Pierre Le Scouarnec, chair of the Sectoral Commission Culture, Communication andinformation, Canadian Commission for UNESCO moderated a presentation by Bill Graham, director, International Telecommunications Policy and Coordination, Industry Canada and Wendy Drukier, senior policy advisory, UN specialized Agencies, Foreign Affairs Canada, outlining the Canadian government's accomplishments and their overall optimism with the process to date.

Journalist Ann Medina was the keynote speaker on the topic: "Has Canada become a genuine knowledge society?"

another blog on WSIS

Discoverd mtl3p's blog. He is invited to event and may end up blogging it. Check it out.

Possible streaming of WSIS

I discovered a post by Robert Guerra (click on title) saying the event may be streamed. Keep an eye and post here if anyone finds out where it is. Thanks.

Background

In preparing to report on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Winnipeg this weekend, I discovered several critical background documents prepared by the Canadian government's interdepartmental committee, made up of representatives from Industry Canada and Foreign Affairs. Have a read by clicking the title.