Open Congress

I just returned from the British islands and what follows are a few comments about the event in which I participated. "Open Congress," placed discourses around open and free culture in the context of Tate Britain in London. The attendees/participators were much younger than those showing up at American or  most international media art festivals that I went to. And yet someone in the audience voiced concern about a lack of youth at "Open Congress." Wow.
The claim to a congress rather than a conference aimed for a break down of the  audience/speaker divide in a Kaprowian sense. But the top down architecture of the Clore auditorium at the Tate, in particular, did not allow for much genuine interplay and role switching despite best intentions and a free wireless network. It was interesting that "Open Congress" was part of a series of linked conferences also including WSFII (The World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures), and Future Wireless.  Also a Cybersalon talk by Gilberto Gill, the Brazilian cultural minister/singer/songwriter and open source proponent could have been announced as part of this series of events. "Open Congress" was prepared by a series of public meetings, which were as formative for the facilitators as the actual event I was told. The media theorist and sociologist Tiziana Terranova pointed to Richard Stallman's fight against the equation of Open Source with efficiency, with processes of optimization. She joins Stallman in his insistence on the difference between Open Source and Free Software. I wonder occasionally, if these battles over terms are really useful and if it is not more important to fight for the larger values at stake. Terranova pointed to the trend to collectivize cultural production, modularized production, and shared culture. And all of this only exists on the precondition that the Internet is "open," that its infrastructure allows for contribution. She emphasized that there is a relationship between content and organizational structure within which this content is created and moved on to the notion of "procedural democracy." Procedural Democracy consists of the basic structures and institutions that must be in place in order for a democracy to flourish. The element of transparency , accountability and the submission to the rule of law make democracy sustainable. She asked, which values are being produced in a given context. Are these values of free speech? Is speech democratized through the Internet ("Virus as free speech")? To what extent can open infrastructures such as the Internet support autonomy and self-organziation. Terranova ended by introducing Manuel Castells' ideas of boot-strapping (to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance), flexibility, stability, recombination, and portability in relation to self-organization.

McKenzie Wark read from Hacker Manifesto and argued for the centrality of the property question in discourses of openness. Felix Stadler rightfully questioned the straight "porting" of open source principles into other spheres of culture. He also pointed out that the degree of openness and closeness of each project needs to negotiated. Stadler emphasized that Wikipedia is swarming with factual mistakes and that it is also a model that requires significant numbers of users, which language spaces other than English may not accomplish. Like at countless other events, I was not able to go to many presentations that i would have loved to see because they were scheduled concurrently. While I could not attend it-- the Seeds for Change workshop on rough consensus building in groups looked useful. Other people I missed but would have loved to see included David Berry and Giles Moss,  Joasia Krysa, Cory Doctorow and Adam Hyde. In about two weeks all our lectures will be available in the webcast archive at the Tate. My presentation slides can also be downloaded (roughly 13 MB).

Thanks to the organizers for making "Open Congress" happen. It'd be good to now look at what worked and what did not. A few questions to start with could include:

Which formats created the best possible discoursive framework? Did the transparency of the event organization and the collective organizing structure offer a workable model for future events? (One of the organizers called their process shambolic). Which settings would be most conducive for concentrated, consequential intellectual debate?