Report from WE SEIZE!

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10.Dec.03 - Monday has been the second day of preparation of the "We Seize!" (after a year of online preparation). It started with a press conference in the morning.

WE SEIZE! Press conference

• Jamie King who is one of the main organizers made a declaration you can find it here

• One of the key points is that at "We Seize!" people who kind of live the information society already are gathering instead of some political leaders.

• The "We Seize!" event has not been planned to be a big event. Instead people from all over the world can participate online.

• The streaming during the conference is made possible for "zero cost" by Free Software.

• Besides freedom of communication mentioned in the declaration freedom of knowledge was highlighted.

• The "Digital Divide" is never digital. Instead it is monetary.

• When accessing the Internet it is important to know how you can use it. This differs much from people getting connected to some business channels. Free Software is at the very base of this know how.

• If software is the basis of the information society putting copyrights on software is like putting a copyright on language. Also proprietary software sets the terms which people have to use to communicate. Free Software frees people to choose these terms individually.

• It is important to prevent technological fetishism as it can be seen in the official WSIS to some degree (e-everything). Instead the people should be the most important thing.

• Free Software and its importance has been mentioned in many contributions.

• "We Seize!" has been named to make clear that we just take what we need instead of waiting what "they" give us.

• Besides Internet streaming other media is used by re-broadcasting the digital streams (radio, television). Also the "We Seize!" uses these type of media itself (particularly in the Polymedia Lab).

• Internet is a cheaper media than other regulated media.

• Program of Strategic Conference has been settled now. [Which changed since the press conference.] There are even printed versions.

• The key concept of "We Seize!" is to show autonomy, demonstrating networking, sharing of knowledge, and so on. Demonstrations on the street are not seen as a good way to show this autonomy.

• The wanted outcome of "We Seize!" is to have some substantial discussions, to learn something, check out practical solutions, show autonomy, connect groups which are subject to the same issues.

• There are attempts to organize self-organized networks independent from e.g. ICANN. This sort of networks becomes more important as the commercial networks prevent free flow of information. This is parallel to the success of Free Software.

• The commercial factions have more disagreement between themselves than to the Free Movement (e.g. IBM/HP vs. M$). The Free movement can grow in the cracks between these factions.

• CRIS published "We Seize!" in the official program. "We Seize!" itself has no relationship to the official process. CRIS has a foot in both areas.

Strategic conference preparations

In the afternoon the second part of the preparation took place. It was mainly concerned with laying out the Strategic Conference. Actually the first two sessions have been merged and the rest stayed as it was.

Tuesday was planned as the first day of the Strategic Conference. However, it has not started yet. The reason is that the police is at the location where the Polymedia Lab takes place. I don't know about the details yet but I understood that the police lets people out of the location only when they take all the equipment with them. Of course this is unacceptable because part of the "We Seize!" event should take place there. As far as I understood there is an agreement of the owner of the location to have the Polymedia Lab there and for instance people received a key for the location but there is no written contract. At the moment there should be some negotiation there. In other words: It's all the same as usual...

Sorry, this is all more or less rumour. What I know, however, is that most of the people went to Polymedia Lab (I'm in the Usine at the moment) and the conference is at least delayed. So much about autonomy...

Actually there is not much to say about Tuesday. As could have been expected the police action in the morning dominated the whole day and so Tuesday is lost for the conference.

In the afternoon / early evening there has been a general assembly where a dominating majority has been very much interested in negotiations with the city council, protest actions which could be taken, and the like. There were some people which were more interested in having the conference because this was the reason they came to Geneva but this played no big role.

Strategic Conference: Day one

As far as I understood the PolyMediaLab will take place in some other space which has been made available by the city council. Day 2 of the conference shall take place today while Day 1 is moved to tomorrow.

One note: I'm just reporting in some detail on what I find interesting. So this does not claim to be complete in any way.

So actually the conference started on Wednesday. There is some IRC channel set up for the conference:

irc.indymedia.org:6667 #sconf

It is projected on the screen in the conference room and it is logged at irclogs.indymedia.org.uk/sconf/2003-12-10.html

I have been a bit late to the first session which was titled "INFOWAR: REPORTS FROM THE FRONT". It was attended by about 30+ persons.

When I entered the session there was a presentation run by Jesus Rogriguez (Venezuelan Community Media) (AFAIK) telling about the situation in Venezuela in quite some breadth and detail. As someone said even the topic of media has been touched at the beginning of the presentation.

Just one impression from the discussion I found interesting. The speaker said something that there is even too much freedom of information in Venezuela. This has been picked up in the discussion. To me there was an interesting differentiation between freedom to create content and the freedom of access.

After that there was a presentation of Sasha Costanza-Chock (FTAA IMC http://ftaaimc.org). He talked about all sorts of repression headed against the Indymedia Center reporting on some protests and against the protests themselves. He also presented some videos from the physical events (you can not film a denial-of-service attack, can you?).

I have also been a bit late to the second session which was titled "HACK_IT!". It was attended by about 30+ persons. I don't have any idea whether I missed some presentation or there has been none. The discussion was quite interesting and there was also a rather Oekonuxy thread in it.

[Please refer to the logged IRC stream because it is a quite good documentation.]

The third session was titled "AUTONOMOUS MEDIA". It was attended by about 30+ persons. Actually the persons which attended the sessions were more or less the same BTW. However, the third session has been attended by some persons which had come especially for that session.

This session has been started by DeeDee Halleck (DeepDish TV) from USA who is into community radio. She mentioned a conference back in 1979 called WORK and showed a film from that time. The basic message as far as I understood is the scarcity of bandwith / frequencies is a problem. Then she went on telling about the news program "Democracy Now!" which is produced by DeepDish for instance where it is broadcasted in the USA.

After that there was a presentation by someone from hackitectura.net. This project is about hacking architecture.

[Please refer to the logged IRC stream.]

After that some guy from South Korea made a presentation about the projects he is involved in.

[Please refer to the logged IRC stream.]

Actually only the hackitectura.net presentation had some discussion while the other presentations did not provoke any reaction. It was interesting that a lot of people had laptops on their knees and you never knew whether they are busy taking notes or check their email or what else. So one of the features of real space meetings - you can see whether people stilll pay attention - vanishes in such a setup.

Stefan Mertens

[Project Oekonux]