News Story

World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures

Mark Gaved, Tuesday 04 October 2005 | Annotate

London saw a gathering of the world's freenetworkers, open source gurus and civic society thinkers for a week of discussion about free information infrastructures this week, culminating in a weekend conference. Mark Gaved attended the weekend events on behalf of KMi and his PhD research into the grassroots networking community. Many of the world's key free network activists were present, including New York City Wireless, Ils Sans Fil (Montreal), Mumbai Free Map, and the Networking Djursland team from Denmark. In the week leading up to the conference, core representatives had been working on a "Booksprint" writing the core of a book in a single week, working to write a manual to help community leaders in developing countries build their own computer network infrastructures. The weekend conference covered a broad variety of issues around both philosophical and practical aspects of open source software and hardware, civic information provision, and debating issues of intellectual property rights in the digital age.