[CWN-Summit] Your Participation is Vital to Make the WSFII a Success

Laura Forlano laura at nycwireless.net
Wed Jul 6 15:05:41 CDT 2005


Hi All.

I am just back from Berlin/Budapest where I was
meeting with international community wireless groups
among other things.  I want to encourage you to
participate in the upcoming World Summit for a Free
Information Infrastructure in London on October 1-3. 
This is going to be an excellent opportunity to
network across groups and set the agenda for community
wireless and open infrastructures around the world. 
This meeting is intended to be an initial event, which
will be followed by a much larger event in Goa, India
in 2006.  Please do what you can to join us in London,
circulate the invitation below and propose sessions
for the conference.  The event is of interest not only
to community wireless groups but also to the open
source, GIS communities and many others.

Have a great summer, and hope to see you in London!!!

Best,
Laura

WSFII PREPCON '05
                                    ~
          ~ World Summit on Free Information
Infrastructures ~

Every year for the last four years, Free Networkers
from around the world have
organised summits, the last one being the Freifunk.net
Summer Convention 2004
in Djursland, Denmark where Free Networkers, free
infrastructure pragmatists
and community network builders from 32 countries got
together, shared ideas,
made plans and forged alliances. 

This year, we are widening the scope through an
association with the Open
Knowledge Foundation (okfn.org) - we want to invite
people from all areas of
free infrastructure development to participate in a
world summit, trying to
cross the streams Free Hardware, Free Software, Open
Geodata, LETS trading
systems, Open Licensing, Community TV/Radio, Public
Knowledge Infrastructures,
and other areas of research and activity that we
haven't thought of yet.

                                ~ why ~ 
    
Because Free Infrastructure developers don't really
have to ask this question.
We have this in common - that FIIs come from pragmatic
application and problem
solving rather than being led by policy or law. By
meeting and joining forces,
we can do what we do more effectively.


                             ~ structure ~

The structure is a 2 day public conference in a
central London location
during which the various FII groups can present their
activities and the
specifics of their FII domain to other groups and the
public. Prior to that
weekend event (1st/2nd October for the London WSFII)
there will be a week
during which a venue will be available to groups if
they wish to hold
preparatory meetings, workshops, talks and social
gatherings.

                              ~ prepcon ~ 

This might not be a 'world' summit with as many
international delegations as we
had in Denmark last year. Instead, this is a call to
FII groups to organise
summits on their continents around the same time, to
feed into a more ambitious
WSFII scheduled for summer 2006 in India. 


                        ~ How to get involved ~

If you are involved in research and activity in one of
the knowledge domains
we've already listed as FIIs, or you work on one we've
missed out, please get
in touch and help by proposing someone, or some group
to come and represent
that FII. 

The first confirmed WSFII venue is London - which will
be the Western European
hub for this year's WSFII prepcon If you would like to
set up a WSFII prepcon
in your locality, please get in touch via the mailing
list:
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wsfii-discuss
and we can set you up a
subdomain.

We are developing a programme on our wiki and taking
registrations for
participation in the london WSFII on the website:
http://wsfii.org, so we look
forward to hearing from you and your FII group there.


Registration:
http://okfn.org/wsfii/wiki/WsfiiRegistration
Discussion / Announcement List:
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wsfii-discuss

All power to Free Infrastructures!

the WSFII provisional organisers.


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