Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge…For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the Internet as we know it. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, the web is going on Strike…Learn more
Last week I was in Brussels for the European Innovation Summit, attending a session on Future Internet and Smart Cities. The vision and frameworks provided in the report I wrote for the European Commission on “Cities and Regions as co-creation platforms: Towards Open European Innovation Ecosystems” were presented in the closing keynote of Markku Markkula, President of Committee of the Regions….It is a great achievement to have an impact on the way policies around future internet are shaped!
Council hosted two IoT sessions in Paris at OWF. I spoke at a panel on the Internet of Things & Open Data: New forms of Organisation and Governance. Important topics were discussed that advance the Open Source debate towards a new complexity, such as new identity frameworks and policies, security issues on data privacy, and the right to modify your mobile device
I have been invited at Picnic for a roundtable discussion organised by Council The Internet of Things . Council hosted a Special Lab City, Design & Play on how to crowdfund the infrastructure in a full Internet of Things world
Last June I was invited for a round table discussion at the “d-cent” Federated Social Web Summit Europe 2011 in Berlin, co-organised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and by the EU FP7 PrimeLife project. Techies, researchers, activists, policy makers and regulators met in Berlin at the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation to discuss the future of a decentralised, standards-based privacy-aware and open Social Web. The video of my talk: http://d-cent.org/video/fsw2011-3jun11-5-OpenRoundtable.mp4
I am publishing some information on this interesting and useful event organised by the Green Party and activists groups on digital freedom and access to knowledge on ACTA and the Public Interest .
I am going to cover the issue for LOOP Magazineso I will try to attend the meeting in Brussels and post some outcomes. For those who read Italian, we wrote an article as Libero Sapere for the magazine Aurora about knowledge, the commons and the strategy of the EU around these issues. We will soon translate it into English 
Pat Mooney on the Dangers of Geoengineering and Manipulating the Planet to Combat Climate Change
More information on: ETC
This is a really important campaign to support, the one against the the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
ACTA is violating fundamental citizens rights and freedoms, rights to privacy and access to the commons. ACTA should be negotiated within the European Parliament and cannot be implemented as multilateral secrete treaty in an obscure and undemocratic way. ACTA should be opposed and the EP should be part of the legislative process.
The European Parliament is about to take very important decisions that will affect the every day use of the internet by europeans: the Telecoms package will be adopted in second reading in April, while the approval of the Medina report, which recommends a very restrictive vision of the web, has been now postponed “sine die” thanks to awareness raised by massive citizen mobilization. The decision to postpone the report “sine die” is confirmed by the JURI committee, where the text was initially voted on the 20/1.
The Medina Report is a Commission’s report on the application of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society. It is advocating for Internet filtering, three-strikes approach, graduated response, and so on and has been proposed by Manuel Medina Ortega, of the PSE. The Telecoms Package, the Universal Services directive and e-Privacy directive, is a common regulatory framework for networks and services, access, interconnection and authorisation. According to many organizations and researchers the Telecoms package is posing serious threats to fundamental rights, privacy and civil liberties, by legalizing a european-wide “graduated response” against citizens and controlling peoples usage of the Internet, changing the very structure of the Internet at the expenses of people’s freedom. According to amendments pushed by AT&T, “network management practices” could be used to discriminate what content, services and applications users could access and use.
What is at stake is no less than Net Neutrality: will MEPs allow discrimination on the internet? To block the Telecoms package, join this initiative from a
citizens coalition and sign this paper.
More info on:
The Green Party website ; Libero Sapere ; La Quadrature du Net; IPTEGRITY
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