What happened since 2nd edition of 2020 Floss Roadmap?
Here is a (too long?) report about what has been going on since 2nd edition was released.
Personal message
First of all and as some of you may have noticed, I broke my neck. And this accident prevented me to fully enjoy Open World Forum 2010, the presence of so many high level speakers and at last but not least to meet with some 2020 Floss Roadmap contributors (what a shame). I have just been able to participate for my presentation of 2nd edition of the Floss Road Map for the closing session thanks to some strong medicine: My apologies those who attended, I was pitiful 
But the good thing about this accident is that I discovered the Twitter power and was able to follow most of what happened during those 2 days and how enthusiastic attendees were about the program we had been preparing for months now. Since that day, I must admit I am addicted to this simplistic communication tool (BTW here is my twitter address). Therefore you will find a new right column on 2020FlossRoadmap.org with all “tweets” which I identified as being linked to the roadmap. #20FRM is the tag used to populate this column: Please feel free to use it when you find subject related to our works, it will be automatically listed on 2020FlossRoadmap.org.
Communication around 2020 Floss Roadmap
Concerning the communication around 2020 Floss Roadmap, we tried to make a better usage of social networks (Facebook, Linkedin, …) and bloggs than we did for the 1st edition (see the results here). The traffic on 2020flossroadmap.org significantly but momentarily raised: this type of communication can only be effective if done on a regular basis (any suggestion or help in this area is welcome).
Nevertheless the feedbacks that we received have been very encouraging. Particularly about the 2 principal messages of 2009 edition i.e. “Floss is like forests” and “Floss to be acknowledged as knowledge commons”. Actually it looks like our findings are in sync with history or at least “l’air du temps”: the clearest evidence being the Nobel in economic science which was awarded to Elinor Ostrom. Mrs Ostrom’s work focuses on the commons, such as how pools of users manage natural resources (knowledge being also considered as a natural resource) as common property. This “coincidence” has been highlighted by Glynn Moody’s article “Back to the Future: 2020 Roadmap Updated” . Matthew Aslett in his article “FOSS: War is over (if you want it)” also insisted on the importance of FLOSS to be acknowledged as a public knowledge asset. This gives a good perspective about where we should put our efforts for 2010 version of our Roadmap.
Open World Forum 2009: Great success, let’s do it again!
During Open World Forum‘s debriefing and while I agreed with all contributors that OWF 2009 has been a great success, I suggested that for next year we should insist on the fact that FLOSS enables the alliance of technology and solidarity i.e. Floss as a mean to innovate (from technological to business aspects) but also as a social factor. I hope this orientation will be positively considered in the coming discussions about 2010 agenda.
Paris Accord
In the same period of time I have been fortunate to be invited at the 2nd round of Paris Accord thanks to Philippe Aigrain’s introduction. Paris Accord is a meeting organised by Transtlantic Consumer Dialogue and its focus is on identifying areas where consumers and creative and inventive communities can work closer together. Several of the clusters presented specific ideas about how the Paris Accord text might be implemented in concrete ways, including specific proposals for financing investments in knowledge as a public good.. During the Software session and its preparation, I had the opportunity to exchange with highly active and international FLOSS personalities about the recommendations we developed in the road map (see the agenda here). My inputs where mainly focused on FLOSS to be acknowledged as public goods and on which incentives and funding mechanisms have to be set up for these public goods to be sustainable. The resulting text upon which we agreed is available here.
One highly interesting finding out of these 2 days is that all activities traditionally managed under copyright control are facing the same type of issues when it comes to free/open access facilitated by technologies. As already mentioned in 2009 version when we discussed about data and contents, we need to take a close look at what is happening in other artistic domains such as music or films: I see a lot of issues echoed from one group to another. When Peter Jenner (respect for the producer of The Clash) says that “Recording industry goes from products to services”, does not that sound familiar? Or when he declares that “Piracy appears when appropriate offer does not exist”, is not that the value proposal of FLOSS? And when Hank Shocklee (big up for Public Enemy’s co-founder) argues that “In music today, consumers are also producers i.e. prosumers”, isn’t this related also to the virtuous circle of FLOSS. Thanks again to James Love and Malini Aisola from Knowledge Ecology International for setting up such a brilliant event.
Free Culture Forum and David Bollier
At the end of October, beginning of November, generous twitterers offered to me the possibility to follow Free Culture Forum in Barcelona. While you may find many interesting videos of the debates on the site http://fcforum.net/ (e.g. J. Rifkin about Distributed Capitalism), I would recommend you to have a close look to the charter resulting of these 3 days of discussions . This document is dealing with broader subject i.e. Culture but there are some common and interesting grounds with 2020 Floss Roadmap and OWF such as open standards, education, net neutrality, sustainability and finally once again commons. On this last topic, I was particularly intrigued by one message : “Governments should support the commons as it supports the market“. This quote excerpted from David Bollier‘ speech about Digital Republic (complete text here) was resuming simply and efficiently one of the thoughts which was in the air of all discussions we’ve been through since months now (By the way, I suspect most of the introduction of FCF charter to be written by Mr Bollier). David Bollier being an experienced commoner (he is a co-founder of Public Knowledge; editor of OntheCommons.org and an activist and writer about the commons – see my review of his last book “Viral Spiral”), I decided to contact him and David gently replied. We agreed to exchange about how to put into practice some of the points he exposed in Barcelona and some ideas we have in the roadmap.
Next steps
Thanks to the material that we collect daily, the fruitful contacts we establish around our works and the circumstances which look quite favourable (“l’air du temps”), it might be interesting to start discussing about 3rd version of 2020 Floss Roadmap, its directions and objectives. I will work on this in the coming days and expect to give some news in a week or two. This will give me time to fully recover (my neck is still not very flexible) and by the way to clarify some ideas.
Best wishes,
Jean-Pierre Laisné.
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