A Global Workshop, A Grand Reopening, and A Man Remembered
By: Havi Hoffman
Tags: Open Access, Mozilla Tech Speakers, Tech Events, Public Domain, Global Diversity Cfp Day

In late January, not quite two weeks ago, the Internet Archive, along with Creative Commons and Wikimedia, hosted a mini-conference to celebrate the Grand Reopening of the Public Domain. The live-streamed event took place on a sunny winter Friday at the Archive, a former Christian Science Church, not far from Golden Gate Park. The classic white edifice houses the Wayback Machine servers, along with many other projects for digital conservation — projects that “champion the public benefit of online access to our cultural heritage and the import of adopting open standards for its preservation, discovery and presentation.”

The event was hosted by Internet Archive founder and Robin Hood of librarians, Brewster Kahle, and included talks by Larry Lessig and Cory Doctorow.

Brewster Kahle with the right angle (from a tweet by Brewster Kahle)

We were celebrating the fact that for the first time in twenty years new works would enter the U.S. public domain, enabling 21st century remix and re-use of old works from 1923, like giving us all permission to sing Happy Birthday and post it on the internet without fear of litigation.

For myself, I’ve been trying to articulate the connection between advocating for speaker diversity at tech events and caring about open knowledge and preservation of the public domain.

Photo by Bronson Farr, posted by Nitya Narasimhan in #MakeTheTalkHappen, Global Diversity CFP Day, NYC, 2018

Access to knowledge is the common thread, the crux of the relationship. The networks that provide access to digital media (audio, video, images, text, research publications, code, recipes, learning materials, and more) and the circuits of tech conferences and developer events represent two types of distribution for extending knowledge and sharing new ideas. You could say that tech events are fleeting and temporal, unless documented and shared after the fact. And you could say that digital content is available 24/7, on demand, except that as the networks become fewer and more centralized, siloed, and censored, availability and choice are diminished. The great promises of the information age are breaking.

If someone else — a government, corporate entity, or other authority — gets to decide and select which knowledge we need access to, it becomes information imperialism, a form of discrimination that risks reducing access to diverse ways of thinking and seeing the world, and brings us to the brink of censorship. Innovation depends upon free and open cross-pollination of ideas.

By constraining and choking off access, we ultimately starve our own abilities, our own future well-being. There’s a very fine line between curation and contraction. Since 2016, we all know more than we ever wanted to about the dangers of filter bubbles.

So let’s never forget to celebrate and sustain the democratization of the conference circuit by the barcamp/hackathon/jsconf pioneers begun in the early years of this century. The connection between that democratization, and the work of those who fight for open content — that intersection of values — has become apparent to me in the days since visiting the Internet Archive and attending the premiere of Quantopia, a multimedia hip hop performance piece, commissioned by the Internet Archive.

Quantopia, DJ Spooky’s remix homage to 50 years of expansive Internet and the digital transformation of our world, premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, an appropriate grand finale for the celebration of the Public Domain. The piece combines remixed sound, image, video, and VR to improvise and explore the generative energy of online media, and the brand-free dynamism of open culture and its artifacts.