SEATTLE -– More than 400 technologists, artists, and academics from around the world converged at the University of Washington campus Saturday for four days of discussions on increasing community involvement in cyberspace.
Topics at "Shaping the Network Society; the Future of the Public Sphere in Cyberspace" ranged from keeping broadband access open to rural and Third World communities, to using the Internet to fight AIDS and improve public health.
Internet luminaries such as Sun's Bill Joy and the Well's founder Howard Rheingold took the stage Sunday evening, but most of the weekend was spent in small group sessions with titles like "E-mail Groups for Social Change" and "Video Activism for $5 a Day."
Energized by the role of the Internet in the recent WTO and World Bank/IMF demonstrations, environmentalists and social activists traded notes on using the Internet as an organizing tool.
Denise Joines, the director of Online Network for the Environment Northwest, said she hopes a time will come when "dot-orgs" generate the same excitement as "dot-com" sites do at present.
ONE/NW is a Seattle area nonprofit providing technological expertise to nonprofits and community groups trying to put up and maintain a Web presence.
Fran Ilich, from the Mexico City artists' group Sputnik, described an event he is planning for the walled border between California and Mexico.
Ilich said he wants to use computer links, images projected on the wall, and musical acts that can be heard in both countries to show that national borders remain very real in people's lives.
At a workshop on email privacy, Steve and Mark Teicher of Predictive Services emphasized that corporate email is neither private nor secure.
Steve Teichner described the vulnerabilities in most client/server email systems that stem from the number of times email is copied and saved, either temporarily or permanently.
He also said that when it comes to pornographic content found on a corporate system, company policies to protect employee privacy are a low priority compared to system reliability. And in most cases the employee will be reported to the FBI.
Bart Preecs, the creator of Make Your Own Media and a former news reporter, talked about ways to break the monopoly of corporate news organizations that currently define what news is. Preecs proposed using open-source software development as an alternative model for journalism. He described the basic problems of news reporting as pack journalism and horse-race political coverage. Another problem, according to Preecs, is the convergence of tabloid and mainstream stories, and the consolidation of media ownership in a half-dozen or fewer hands.
"News decisions are based on revenue models," he said. "News is the information that oscillates between the (publication) times dictated by the revenue models."
Most information that people might find useful is not considered to be newsworthy, he said, because it stretches over a longer period than the daily news cycle most of the press adheres to. He recommended using lots of volunteers working over the Internet to cover local issues and events, and delve into subjects that do not follow a daily news cycle.
University of Amsterdam Communications professor Cees Hamelink warned that the process for deciding most critical decisions on the future control of information and technology have been moved to the private sector.
In fact, he said, these decisions are not even being made by the WTO, but dictated by a self-convened group of the 500 largest communications and technology companies under the name of the Global Business Dialogue. At their previous meeting in Paris last September, he said, the group appointed a 29-member steering committee, headed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Veran Matic, director of Belgrade's dissident radio station B92, was originally scheduled to be on a panel at Shaping the Network Society, but was unable to attend. Less than a week before the Seattle meeting opened, Serbian authorities raided the station's offices and studios twice. The first raid took the station off the airwaves, but B92 managed to continue getting their programs out, broadcasting over the Internet.
In the second late night raid, police confiscated B92's computer equipment as well, effectively shutting them down. A reception for Matic was rescheduled as a benefit for B92, and held Saturday night.
