[Fsf-friends] symposium on copyleft revolution in a conference on critical geography

[Nagarjuna G.]

Dear friends,

I proposed a symposium on copyleft revolution to this conference to be
held in Mumbai at TISS from 3rd till 7th of Dec 2007.

http://www.5thiccg.org/

Those of you want to speak in the symposium, please submit your
proposals before the end of 20th August 2007.  The shape of the
session will be confirmed by 3rd of September 2007.   The symposium
will accommodate about five speakers on the panel, and the total
duration including at least half-an-hour discussion will be about 2
hours.

Copyleft Revolution

In the last thirty years the role and significance of Information and
Communication Technology have grown significantly, reconfiguring the
spatial logic of modern society. However, it has not remained an
equally accessed base and gone under the control of a few global
corporations that are investing billions of dollars for its
modernisation, impacting the process of knowledge construction and
dissemination for a small section of the society and thereby
transforming other fields of human creativity.  As a response to the
above hegemonistic framework, a parallel cultural and political
movement is under way that is growing at an unprecedented pace and
influencing the way how science, software and other kinds of symbolic
forms are created, published and distributed.  Popularly known as the
Copyleft culture, it is essentially a Free Software Movement that took
off by an innovative use of the existing copyright and by publishing
software under a copyleft license.  This license is meant to give four
fundamental rights to the user of the software published under the
copyleft license: to use it for any purpose, to understand how it
works, to make modifications, and to distribute the modifications.

One of the major outcomes of this revolution is the GNU/Linux
operating system (popularly known by its misnomer, Linux). The
copyleft movement is currently transforming other fields of human
creativity as well---science, poetry, music, cinema and other symbolic
forms. Of these, the most popular success story is Wikipedia.org, the
largest multilingual encyclopedia of the world. There are other, not
yet fully fructified, movements such as public library of science,
open access, creative commons, open music, etc.

The proposed session aims at generating awareness about the Copyleft
movement in general, and discussing its relation to science and
education in particular. While challenging the patent and other
similar systems, it also intends to deliberate on a new model of
development of ICT, centered around collaboration and sharing among
different communities.

Contact address : Nagarjuna G, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science
Education Mumbai, India, nagarjun at gnowledge.org




-- 
Nagarjuna G.