A few weeks back I was visited by Noel Hidalgo here in Brighton. Noel wanted to interview me in Tactical Tech's office and talk about the work I've done with organizing groups and how I came to work for such a great organization.
Noel is traveling around the world and conducting interviews with a wide range of folks working on the intersection between social justice and technology, particularly open source.
I've been fascinated by discussions around copyright and intellectual property ever since I attended my first Source camp (Summer Source - Croatia, 2003). The discussion of what should be "public" as opposed to "private" kind of makes me hot. I could listen to these debates for hours. I think the piece that always gets me about copyright is the Mickey Mouse case - whenever mickey's copyright is about to expire, the copyright laws change to leave him in the full blown control of Disney. Never mind the fact that Disney has made a mint off of a slew of stuff that was in the public domain (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc.).
So even though I'm an avid fan of the Mac operating system, I try to use open source tools as much as possible (since part of my job is advocating that NGO's around the world use open source). I've successfully weened myself off of Microsoft Office and now solely use Open Office (which I really do like by the way).
I've tried to switch my web-browser several times. Firefox is probably the best damn web-browser on the planet and it seems ridiculous that I use the Mac's Safari browser over it all the time, especially since Safari often runs into problems with certain scripts on web-pages. The issue though comes down to performance. Firefox running on my little Chicklet (my 12" power mac G4) brings the whole system to its knees. I can't listen to iTunes at the same time without massive pauses - its extremely irritating! Also the rainbow pinwheel will appear constantly and pause me in the midst of whatever typing I'm doing. So I last maybe 2 hours in Firefox and then switch back to Safari.
I have to say I initially was caught a bit off guard - but I was seriously dissed at Asia Source II by a camp participant who apparently found me to be an arrogant american. What was fascinating about it all was that it started out as a bit of fun by the Participants in the track I was facilitating. They decided to prepare a short skit for morning circle that included them imitating the facilitators of the track. Before the day was through, I found myself being seriously dissed on the camp blog, cries of homophobia being voiced by some of my closer friends at the camp and a series of events occuring that initially had me very troubled but ended up with me becoming very proud of the response by the camp participants.
I've just arrived in Jakarta and am helping out with prepping for Asia Source II. Fortunately things seem really under control here, considering 140 people are about to descend upon us. Jakarta is very hot and sticky, so I'm really looking forward to getting to Sukabumi, where the event is being held, which is in the mountains, and reportedly much cooler.
If you want to read more about Asia Source II, see the wiki thats been set up at http://www.foss-at-work.net/asiasource2/
This is my fifth Source Camp working as a facilitator - and I'm working on the "Open Source Software Migration and Implementation" track. These are by far my favorite training experiences because its 7 days of 3 hour sessions. So you really get to sink your teeth in. One thing that was learned pretty early on in these camps is that the camp is only as good as the participants.
