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The Kerala experience

geschrieben von Stefan Meretz am in English,Freie Software | Kommentare sind deaktiviert

[Stefan Merten of Oekonux [1] wrote an interesting report of a free software conference in India. Here is the post [2]]

I’m just on the way back home from this great conference which took place in Thiruvananthapuram in the state of Kerala / India. I must say I’m really deeply impressed. I would wish that Free Software including things like Oekonux says would have that backing in Germany / Europe / industrialized countries!

Right now while we are struggling hard to find funding for our 4th conference [3] I came to a place where the best hotel in town has been made not only the place for the conference but also gave a great temporary home for some of the speakers. That’s all possible because the state of Kerala employs an impressingly firm and decided Free Software strategy. Therefore obviously the government is ready to pay for such a conference including lunch and tea breaks and dinners…

And not only this. The Chief Minister of the State of Kerala were present during the inaugural session and addressed the audience and emphasized the necessity of Free Software and other Free knowledge resources. During the final session the chief of the opposition were present.

And if I then think of the press coverage this conference got in some standard news papers. It is really amazing! But not only the conference got news coverage. In the Sunday paper — i.e. before the conference and not related to it — there were also an article about a Free Dictionary for North-East Indian languages. They really mean it!

The conference itself was really two conferences in one. There were a technology track and a policy/culture track — though culture were not really there. I don’t know for sure but I think the conference participants also split between these two tracks. I for one attended none of the technology presentations. There were also 450+ registered participants — so it was really a rather big event.

During personal conversations I learned that in Kerala many are interested in not only the technology but also in the possible philosophical / societal meeting.

But what really amazed me most that the things Oekonux started to talk about nearly 10 years ago at least in Kerala slowly become an accepted idea. The potential of peer production is seen by many — though I still think what we do here is quite elaborated in this regard. In fact the talk I gave [4] (which is heavily revised compared to the version I sent here [5]) was welcomed by a couple of people afterwards.

I really would conclude that much of the potential of the whole peer production movement meanwhile moved to places like Kerala. This opinion I share for instance with Juan-Carlos (Hipatia) who also names South America here. I even thought that Thiruvananthapuram could be a place for the 5th Oekonux Conference. May be in the form of some partnership…

What also surprised me that the conference was attended by a relatively high share of women. I took a few samples and would guess about 25%. And in sharp contrast to the majority of women I see on German Free Software conferences these women were not the female part of a couple. However, the gender distribution of the speakers was as usual.

Of course there were a couple of interesting speakers including Eben Moglen, Richard Stallman, Jimmy Wales, Neville Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks). Michel Bauwens and Adam Arvidsson gave talks, too.

For me the best of all talks were the keynote of Eben Moglen. I’ll give some key aspects of it below. First I’d like to share two things:

Keynote by Eben Moglen

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