I’m currently staying at Oxford (UK) working on some interesting projects. The last three days I’ve been meeting with most the Software Freedom International board, of which I’m president. We’ve been planning out Software Freedom Day 2007 and are aiming for the biggest global celebration of Software Freedom ever!
Software Freedom is an underpinning value of the FLOSS community, as well as others that value transparency, sustainability and the opportunity to participate in software and technology. The basic idea is that as more and more of our lives are based on technology (communication, history writing, culture creation, electronic elections, etc) it is imperative the technology we rely on is transparent (open, visible, able to be scrutinised) and sustainable (data must be accessible long term), otherwise how can we trust our basic human rights are being upheld in a world where technology underpins everything we do? How can we participate in the technology that shapes our future?
I wrote a short summary of this from the perspective of human rights and really believe that as more and more of the world becomes connected (particularly with the OLPC coming out) that bodies like the United Nations need to consider digital freedoms in their declaration of human rights, otherwise those basic human rights become compromised.
More on my other work here to come!
