From the Forum to the 'hood

Biella Coleman pens some thoughts on the Decoding Liberation book launch party at the Brecht Forum last week (and segues nicely into some ruminations on Web 2.0 and FOSS). Her opening remarks on Decoding Liberation were very thoughtful, and I truly appreciate her putting in the time needed to work on them (especially given teaching work!). We'll be having our next event at VoxPop, our local favorite coffee shop, this Thursday, October 18th at 7 PM, so, please come on out if you can. The structure will be a little different; Scott and I will read from a couple of chapters each and then get into questions/discussion. VoxPop serves great beer (my favorite American brewers, DogFish feature on tap!) and has very good politics. It should be an interesting evening.

Decoding Liberation at the Brecht Forum

Our first book-release event took place this past Wednesday at the Brecht Forum(I haven't linked to the Forum's site because their domain name seems to have expired!). Biella Coleman was the commentator and she did a wonderful job in explicating some of the book's central points (hopefully, Biella is going to post her comments up at her blog very soon). It also led to some good questions and a lively discussion. Some questions: if we are so critical of non-copyleft licensing in Chapter 2, why do we let the FSF off the hook for their tolerance of non-copyleft licensing? What does the FOSS movement really mean for day-to-day non-sophisticated users of technology? Does using FOSS automatically bring political reform/liberation/liberalism in its wake? Does the use of different kinds of FOSS licenses affect the quality of software? What implications does the FOSS model have on other domains of production? There were also some requests for clarification on the nature of licenses and terminology. All in all, a good night with a few bottles of wine helping things along. The next book-release event will be on October 18th at 7 PM at VoxPop on Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn. Come one, come all. For other events, at Labyrinth Books, Brooklyn College, and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, check out the book's information page on the right.