Drumbeat Festival – Aftermath:Local overview (1)
Revolutionizing the learning, spur innovation and participation
It’s been one month since the first ever Drumbeat International Festival happened in Barcelona. It was amazing, engaging, we learnt a lot from it. There were many things who went excellent, things that we should improve for a next time (and thus, after spending the last month evaluating/thinking and reading different reactions and blog-posts).
But, overall, that was an amazing experience for everyone involved and the numbers are a proof of that:
- from 430 participants, approximately 150 were from the local ground (Barcelona area, the rest of Catalonia and from several cities of Spain);
- New Mozillians on board! This experience has turned Mozilla local community to become a stronger voice. This has helped it become even more open and diverse.
- more than 9 local communities participated actively and worked together helping to build the Festival;
- a great 5 minutes event coverage by La Malla Tendencies (broadcasted on the Catalan local television network) ;
- various articles in local media (in Catalan and in Spanish) and a few others in other European media;
- a series of events and some cool projects to improve the Learning & Digital society are on the way!
Probably, most of you are wondering who were the local committee and how we decided which people came in… how we met each other.
This is a long story, since all from the local committee worked together before to build events/movements and actively participate in the development of a strong local digital society. From facilitating the organization of the first ever Mozilla European Camp in Barcelona (in 2008), to organizing One Web day in 2009 , building an Assembly for Free Knowledge and Software and many other activities aimed on building a strong local digital society.
For three months, we’ve been working together to build the unknown, to write the story of what Drumbeat is and show that all global movements start with a strong local seed. In fact, that is what Drumbeat is about.
If some of you think that the Festival ended well… for us, it just started. Here is a web that is meant to continue the momentum and give informations on ongoing projects and information about what’s happening locally.
We will maintain wiki page where anyone will be able to follow what is happening in Barcelona after the Festival, which projects are taking form or how we would be getting funds to sustain new ideas and initiatives.
Open Access – becoming a reality in Barcelona
Yes, it probably sounds weird, but for the Festival we decided to rely on a community wireless initiative. Guifi.net is a project which started a few years ago by some people from the countryside who wanted to share the network between distant points. A bit by a bit, it started to spread in all Catalonia and even abroad. Simple to set-up, Guifi.net has been providing wireless connection in various public events and public places. Built by a community and meant to offer open access to everyone, it’s a working success. Check here to learn more about the philosophy behind Guifi.net .
Experiments that could change the vision on learning.
Probably one of the most interesting events which took place in Barcelona Festival, with a deep impact on the local learning, was Open Raval Classroom. RavalNet, Citilab, UrbanLabs and other partners, organized a learning lab (classroom) right after the Festival, combining Web and Open technologies workshops in a Public Museum. This allowed kids from Raval to learn about the Web, to play with Arduinos, to learn programming with scratch or to edit wikis.
The result was more than interesting and probably this experiment will continue and extend on other local venues; maybe by including more city elements, or maybe by entering schools.
Barcelona is well-known as being an innovation hub, because of its openness and diversity of initiatives. There are more than 500 non-profits that help people to share their learnings. Also dozens of open spaces and hackerspaces with the aim of promoting the values of free knowledge, free software and participation.
Drumbeat Festival brought together part of those people and initiatives. We are currently thinking about developing a collaboration platform that could help all these initiatives to exchange materials and experiences, to learn more about tools as Universal Subtitles and even helping on preparing Catalan courses for P2PU School of Webcraft. These are a part of the local Drumbeat projects that are now in early planning stage.
During our first meeting after the Festival, we discussed about the different visions on open funding. Goteo and maybe an Awesome Foundation chapter were explored (we are open to other suggestions!). Indeed, open funding is something to consider on the local ground if we want projects to evolve into concretion. It is challenging, but, certainly, worth approaching.
Indeed, 2011 will be great and will bring even more innovation and openness to the city. With new people on board, we just started to build a local Mozilla Drumbeat strategy, so the seed from the Festival can end up in a blooming. In the future, I’ll come with more pieces on this blog. And if you want to follow what’s happening here, join the Drumbeat Barcelona discussion list!
Recreando el Bazar
Hemos llegado al punto que la tecnología y la gran variedad de elección nos está poniendo delante una imagen difusa de lo que llamamos ahora el Internet.
Y lo digo no porque lo que tenemos ahora esté mal; al contrario, hoy en día la tecnología de Internet nos ofrece las herramientas necesarias y la apertura para aprender, compartir y comunicar con gente de todo el mundo. Vivimos posiblemente una de las mejoras eras del Internet. Tenemos tantas tecnologías donde escoger que ya no sabemos cuál es la mejor. La red social está a punto de substituir la manera como recibimos noticias, comunicamos y compartimos nuestros pensamientos. El vídeo ya es uno de los formatos más conocidos con el que compartimos sentimientos y opiniones y, al mismo tiempo, el libro de papel ya se está moviendo a formatos digitales.
Sin duda, hoy en día, muchos de nosotros, sobretodo aquellos más jóvenes, estamos aprendiendo más cosas a través del Internet que, a veces, incluso en la propia escuela. O mejor dicho, la escuela incluso ya utiliza como plataforma para la enseñanza el Internet.
Hace 12 – 13 años ya pasaba lo mismo, el mundo tecnológico había llegado a su saturación, los proyectos transformándose ellos mismos en catedrales demasiado grandes para aguantar su propio peso.
Entonces, el navegador y el sistema operativo eran las únicas vías de acceso de la gente al Internet, dándoles de esta manera la oportunidad de encontrar nuevas experiencias en la Web; una Web que parecía la odisea de un nuevo mundo lleno de innovación.
Entonces el problema no era la gran variedad donde escoger, sino el propio modelo restringido de desarrollo, que tenia su fundaciones detrás del paradigma del «uno se come al otro».
Todo esto ha hecho a la gente construir el bazar*, a lo largo de varias reuniones ad-hoc, pero con un objetivo muy bien definido, todo por la necesidad de crear nuevas tecnologías: simples, ligeras y que permitieran crear nuevos modelos de colaboración, para poder ofrecer la posibilidad de innovar y dar vida a las ideas.
Y así, hemos llegado hoy a tener toda esa tecnología, y también, su multitud de variedades. Ya tenemos docenas de navegadores, sistemas operativos diferentes y todo tipo de dispositivo —grandes y chicos, móviles y encastados—, que nos permiten conectarnos a la red.
En una conversación qué tuve con un amigo, él me pregunto: «¿Pero para qué necesitamos más, si ya tenemos todo ésto?»
Aunque parezca difícil de imaginar, la idea del bazar no ha muerto y, sobretodo, cuando para muchos (incluso quienes fueran sus creadores en su tiempo) pueda parecerles hoy mucho más difícil darse cuenta.
Sí, todavía existe gente que puede crear: sí, todavía existe una tecnología que nos permite crear. Por lo tanto, el sueño de un nuevo modelo de bazar no es imposible. Y, sobretodo, cuando precisamente un nuevo modelo de bazar puede cambiar la dirección del futuro, dando libertad a la innovación social.
Parezca filosófico o no, ésta es la realidad. Una realidad que estoy descubriendo cada día más: una realidad que me vuelve más optimista cada día.
Desde hace 1 año estoy contribuyendo (a veces de forma más pasiva, y otras más activa) en el proyecto Drumbeat, de la Fundación Mozilla. La primera vez ha sido difícil entender qué pasa; pero, con el tiempo, viendo tantas ideas crecer y nuevas comunidades formándose, estoy vislumbrando un movimiento que puede dar vida a ideas simples, pero clave, e incluso, ser capaz de construir un modelo nuevo para la sociedad digital, la sociedad que ya es la de hoy.
Y, como una sociedad tiene como base la educación —desde donde se edifica el aprendizaje personal—, precisamente es ahí donde se tiene que empezar a ser rompedor y creativo: poder ofrecer alternativas a lo que ya hay; porque la catedral y el bazar siempre han coexistido.
Este inicio puede ser el Festival de Drumbeat, donde gente que ha creado la ola del Internet se reunirá junto con gente que viene a enseñar sus proyectos o simplemente quieren contribuir en el diseño de una nueva manera de colaborar. En definitiva, encontrar el equilibrio para que la (co)existencia del bazar y de la catedral sea posible también en las próximas décadas.
Continuará…
* En el texto se ha utilizado la terminología del bazar, refiriéndose al significado que le ha dado Enric S. Raymond en su libro «La Catedral y el Bazar». El bazar era una nueva manera de desarrollo que abría a los desarrolladores el camino hacía creación y la innovación.
Fuentes para consultar:
“The Paradox of Choice” – Barry Schwartz
“The Cathedral and The Bazaar” – Eric S. Raymond
A personal “Welcome!” to another community-driven organization
It is a big day for the Open Standards and Free Software movement. The community behind OpenOffice.org, decided today to announce the Document Foundation, a community driven organization.
I remember talking to friends, a few months ago, wondering about the future of Open Office. I stated then that OpenOffice.org would have a future when it will be completely open to the community and owned by a community-driven, independent organization. I can’t describe the excitement I have today.
I’ve been an OpenOffice.org user for years, despite the critics it received during for long (whether it’s slow, it crashes, than it less usable than other office suites etc.) But I continued to use it because of ethical and moral reasons (the same reasons that made me believe in Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Fedora Linux and other community-driven projects).
But this is something more than software, it is about the way we share and own our information, about the way we use technology and build it to serve the civil society. Documents, as other formats (video, audio and web standards) are key elements in our lives, assuming that through them people share, create and innovate.
A few years ago, when a community decided to create what is now Mozilla Foundation in order to support the Mozilla project (whose I am a proudly contributor), nobody realized how this would change the web and the way that millions of people are using it. In the same year, Red Hat (probably one of the most known businesses in Free Software) launched the community-driven project Fedora Core, which actually contributed to make desktop/server GNU/Linux what it is today.
Therefore, after many years was followed by other public benefits that have one common mission, let the technology be in control of people (users) and independent of one corporate interest.
Indeed, the technology we have today is thanks to such decisions which comes from people’s desire and based on people’s needs. In fact, that happened many times along history, despite all.
Having the conviction that this day will completely change the picture of document standards and the office software future, I will close by congratulating the founding members for taking this decision (which, probably, will positively affect millions of users in the near future) and wishing the community all the best in the efforts to develop what LibreOffice now is! And long life, Document Foundation!