Paris: zeligConf - European meeting of digital counter-cultures - Program

ZeligConf - Program
European meeting of digital counter-cultures
December 15,16,17 - Paris - France

V1.1

On december 15th-17th will take place in Paris the zeligConf, european
meeting of digital counter-cultures.

This event will not be a seminar but a meeting, a space of cooperation
proposed to the multitude of actors of alternative communication, a
temporary laboratory of social and cultural experimentation on
communication, a space-time of encounter for the different active subjects
of digital communication practises.

The zeligConf will be as well a place for political debate and
confrontation, as a place to implement communication projects and
arrangements.

The zeligConf will be organised auround four major themes:

+Movements, activism and communication
+Free software and productive cooperation
+Network knowledge and intellectual property
+Internet and contents control

The zeligConf will alternate debates, workshops and specific thematic
spaces, in order to combine the public space of confrontation and the
collective arrangement of practical propositions on transnational
cooperation.

At last, the zeligConf will be the occasion for some involved in the
preparation of the conference to launch several european projects they have
been working on during last months. Among which:

+ A network for technical-scientific knowledge exchange
+ A european alternative press agency
+ A personnal data protection charter

Debate-conferences
------------------

The debate-conferences will be structured in two moments. A succession of
short introductive interventions by invited speakers, then a free
discussion with all participants.

It is about opening a field of confrontation, more than achieving unified
positions, about making possible a circulation of propositions and ideas,
propitious to the emergence of transnational projects.

+Movements, activism and communication
It will be as well about conducting an inventory of fixtures in the
experience of digital communication practises of NGOs, social movements,
militant initiatives or activism, as about atempting to formalise
hypotheses on a wide integration of the Internet, and on potentialities of
free software in the development of alternative communication initiatives.

+Free software and productive cooperation
What we have in view is to question the free software dynamics and its
collective and cooperative production cycle on its potentialities to become
a new productive model or not, and on its capacity to modify on "a large
scale" the connection between creation/production and use.

+Network knowledge and intellectual property
As we approach the knowledge society, where immaterial production
dominates, the question of intellectual property acquires a determinant
centrality as it opposes more and more openly the process of social
innovation and creation. What new definition for an intellectual property
that would respect both author's right and social need to access knowledge?

+Internet and contents control
The atempts, public as well as private, to impose contents control
procedures, that are more or less admitted forms of censorship, worry
associative actors of the network of networks. In the same time, we have
good reasons to wonder about their effective reach. Between the
Echelon-parano and the libertarian energy of the Freenet project, what now
on people's freedom on the Internet?

Laboratories-Workshops
----------------------

The laboratories-workshops are collective work spaces on projects already
implemented by participants of the meeting.

+ Technical/scientific knowledge exchange network
The aim of this workshop is to determine what ressources (human, hard and
software) a network of cooperative development and technical/scientific
data exchange needs to constitute. This exchange being both of formal
(code) and informal (use) data among actors of the alternative stage of the
Internet. The main interest will be the settlement of a decentralized
databases system of shared ressources (source code, config files,
tutorials, etc.), and of logistics making possible the exchange among
those databases.

+ Re-wiring the Internet : The Freenet project
Freenet is an open-source project initiated by Ian Clarke, aiming at
developping a customer/server distributed system giving the possibility to
publish anonymously any document or file, making imposible any inquiry on
the users activity, or on the origin of the file or even its precise
localization on the network. The object of this workshop will clearly be
the recess of the french Freenet development team that has been working
this year and producing an important work of traduction of documentation
and texts connected to the project. It will be about explaining the
philosophy and general operation principles of Freenet project, and, if it
is possible, demonstrating a freenet server on samizdat.net.

+ Initiations to cryptography
Cryptography is the only means to preserve confidential/personal data on
the networks. It is also the only means of authentification for electronic
documents. Recently legalized in France, it remains difficult to access for
"common" users. It will be about presenting general principles of
cryptography and the use of crypting tools (PGP, GnuPG, stenography) on
different platforms (Windows, MacOS, GNU/Linux).

+Introduction to free Unix systems
Beyond the "Linux" hype, free Unix computer systems propose users a
radically different approach to their machines, away from the "consuming
model" of proprietary software. The general presentation of global
architecture and operation principles is according to us the necessary path
to take for a pertinent use of free Unix (GNU/Linux or BSDs), and to coach
absolute beginners. This session is also an introduction to the install
party of the day after.

+ GNU/Linux install party T
he idea is to give the opportunity to users willing to install a version of
GNU/Linux on their machines to do so in this workshop, with the help and
assistance of members of several associations. Plainly talking, we will not
install GNU/Linux on computers, but help each to do so by oneself, because
we think the first step to free OS is to take charge of oneself.

Specfic Spaces
--------------

+ Videos
Projections of experimental and autoproduced films : «Vienne qui pourra»,
«Il gommone», «La grève des enseignants du Gard» (Arlea TV), etc.

+ Bookshop
A selection of books on communication, free software, new economy, digital
underground, etc.

+ Softshop
Available free software and GNU/Linux distributions.

Ceremony
---------

+ Big Brother Awards for France
A Prize for any person or institution distinguished for its scorn of
fundamental right to protection of private life or its promotion of
surveillance and control of persons and groups. BBAs come with a special
prize awarding persons or organizations who, through their fight against
surveillance and persons control, commited themselves in favour of
protection of privacy. BBAs will also take place late october in
Switzerland, Germany and Great-Britain.

Communication
-------------

Event on communication, the zeligConf must also be a communicating event,
it must pecularly be an occasion to give visibility to projects and
practises, before, during and after the meeting.

+ The paper
Every participant will receive a free copy of a one shot multilingual
zeligConf paper, including certain documents to be discussed during the
three days of the meeting, netlinks and practicle info for foreigner
participants.

+The radio
Radio Sherwood (Padova, Italy) provides material infrastructure for live
and direct webroadcasting of programs made by their team, to download in
different languages.

+ The web
The website of the ZeligConf, that already works as a space for
documentation and encounters, now has a discussion forum. During the three
days of the meeting, a "real-time" online paper will broacast in text and
images both atmosphere and content of workshops. Several webcams will
provide continuous sequences of the event.

+TV
Certain essential moments of the meeting, and also the audio/video
productions presented during the zeligConf will be webroadcasted.

References
----------

+ Zelig, le Web
 http://www.samizdat.net/zelig

+ Paris Calling
 http://www.samizdat.net/zelig/news.php3?detail=n971547152.news

+ WebBBS - The zelig discursive web
 http://www.samizdat.net/bbs/list.php?f=3

+ Register !
You will can register yourself on line soon.

Contacts :  zelig@samizdat.net