Software Libre y la Construcción Democrática de la Sociedad
[ updated on December 2009 ]
The Free Software movement has traditionally been seen mainly as a technical movement, working towards a common knowledge body, expressly focused towards operating computer systems. We are presenting it, however, as one of the triggerers -and as one of the clearest success cases- of the Free Knowledge movements.
We explore how the Free Software movement’s ideary, born as an ideological movement in the mid 1980s, corresponds with the historical logic of the scientific development that has evolved all along mankind’s growth, and is presented as a mechanism that should reempower the scientific and technological development that has brought us through millenia of civilization. We tackle the ideological posture of Free Software, exported and widened towards other areas of human knowledge, generating a cascade of innovative ideas, emphasizing on knowledge production.
We go through some examples, characteristic of the knowledge society, where we can develop some basic characteristics of freedom in a modern, democratic society through Free Software: Trust, privacy, anonimacy and individual freedoms.
This work -still perceived by us as to be a work in progress- was first presented in Congreso Internacional de Software Libre y Democratización del Conocimiento, organized by Universidad Politécnica Salesiana in Quito, Ecuador, October 2008
Attachments
LaTeX Beamer sources for the presentation (plus photos and graphics) (2592 KB)
Original article as presented in late 2008 (ODT format) (40 KB)
Presentation (PDF format) (2935 KB)
Comments
Marco Fioretti 2008-11-01 03:43:03
Congratulations for your talk at the congress
Gunnar,
I listened with great interest to your talk, as there seems to be several similarities in what we say. I too, for example, am against e-voting: http://digifreedom.net/node/52 and, in general, promote digital awareness as an essential tool for a truly democratic society, and Free Software as a part of it which has little meaning if it’s only restricted to programmers.
Congratulations!
Marco Fioretti