I am on a roll! After Brazil I have been inspired, I’ve written some stuff up about WSIS and FISL (to be blogged over the weekend), and I’ve got my head together with some stuff for LA over the next 6 months. I learnt a lot in Brazil, most of all the importance of actually contributing something. I want to start a Free Knowledge repository _and_ a telecentre deployment in Australia. I have started to look around in Australia and realise we have real problems here as well as the capacity and resources to fix them (at least in part). Giving everyone equal opportunity can seem an idealistic dream, but we can come close. By giving people access to something better than they may otherwise get, you are increasing the opportunities for that person, that individual. By improving our communications, idependent media and the free knowledge available, we can begin to break down the systems that pigeon-holed us years ago. We have 4000 machines sitting with ComputerBank NSW atm, affiliations with many groups, many wonderful volunteers, many skills and ideas and a whole lot of energy (when we get riled up 🙂 so what are we waiting for?
I think people are starting to wake up, and it is amazing how much people want to contribute once they are given the opportunity. I believe it is human nature to give, but that nature is suppressed by our upbringing which says “NO! You must be secretive, and protect yourself, and did we mention dog eat dog!”. Anyway, more and more people are seeing beyond that, and it is refreshing 🙂
The free knowledge project I want to help with, would hopefully fill that niche, giving a very low-tech solutions that anyone can contribute to easily. It would hopefully include two components, one for collaborative development, and one for simply finding data. Google is great, except it is hard to judge Quality (see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), relevance, and up to date-ness quickly, making the tool very hard. I imagine a system where we have easy to read summaries, dates, headings, relevant links, and a rating system that the initial rater and then the users can add to, giving the searcher some idea. Something that has ‘tracks’ so that a single entry may be relevant to several areas, and will show up under several areas. Something easy to traverse to a track of interest. There has been discussions started on this, email me if you are interested in such a thing 🙂 It is still very fuzzy, although there seems to be enough interest and momentum to make it work 🙂 pia at linux.org.au
Now, I had better clarify for everyone that doesn’t know, we have moved the wedding from the tentative November to next April, the weekend before LCA2005 (man, we are SUCH geeks ). More details as they come up, but we are trying to figure out a way to include as many people as want to come, without having to morgage the parents’ houses 🙂