Review: Gilberto Gil at SAT

I just got back from Gilberto Gil’s second event here in Montreal, a kind of curated discussion between the Brazilian Culture Minister and Tropicalismo musical innovator and rebel Gil, the Digital Policy Coordinator Claudio Prado (sweetly anarchic and kind), and four academics and activists implicated in digital media.

Gilberto Gil, and Brazil as a whole, have been an amazingly eloquent force for open access, both in speech and practice. He speaks about it in an inspired but calm way, infused with an artist’s inherent passion for public space and practice, but also a zen appreciation of the political process and all it’s ahem challenges. Brazil’s government has gone further then perhaps any other nation in the world in embracing free open software, and lead an avant garde in understanding remixing, collaboration, shared culture generally. As Gil and Prato explained today, this is largely because in the favelas and throughout the grassroots communities of Brazil, sharing and collaborating and gift giving make fundamental gut-instinct sense, where copyright tends to perplex or provoke mockery. The two have a great tension and balance between them as speakers, and the question-based format with the 4 askers providing broad themes for four broad question periods worked well for me.

Ann Goldenberg spoke in French, and called herself a Free and Open Source Software militant, which struck me as awfully enthusiastic till I remembered that in French this just means activist… I think. She asked, in the long, windy frame-the-question way the 4 askers were encouraged to do, about Web 2.0. She also expressed gratitude for the government’s work advancing what is sometimes considered a “folle avant garde” (a phrase I love).

In reply Claudio Prato said, and I paraphrase and translate here from French,

“the Web 1.0 was not the web, it was just doing the same 19th and 20th century things faster. Web 2.0 is the web finally! A new culture that obliges us to reinvent everything.”

Brazil has committed to a complete migration of all government services to open source software. This is happening slowly, but Brazil itself is web enabled to an awe inspiring degree. According to Gil and Prado they have the highest proportion of web users of anywhere in the world, and every single kid in the shanty towns knows how to go to the local hotspot with it’s pirate software, use the internet, update their Orkut profile.

Regarding the delays at the governmental level in making everything open source, they explained that though the software is free, the migration is not, and they are working to make room in upcoming budgets to do it thoroughly and well. They face staunch opposition from the levels of government that use software most regularly - people in administrative and clerical positions. This is the same everywhere of course.

Later on Gil talked about how, when he was first in government, he sat with other officials, wrote a policy for Brazil, and tried to pass it. The reaction was so negative and harsh and they withdrew the bill. Later, when trying to create a plan for Brazilian Public Television, he reversed the process. They went to the people first. By spreading the friction of the dialogue out over 1 year and as many groups of people as possible, they were able to come together on a plan that can and will work.

This makes me think about how software gets developed in rooms far from where Brazilian administrators experience their daily interactions with software and society. Maybe community leaders from the different projects used in Brazilian government should work with those administrators and clerks for 1 year?

Catherine Roy talked about digital accessibility for people who are handicapped. This represents 750 million people, which is somewhere between the population of India and the United States. Huge, and most of the time a neglected ‘minority’ perspective when it comes to technology, policy and building design, etc. She also noted how cutting edge Brazil has been, and in reply Gil told the story of one person in his life and then another bringing to his attention the problems of digital access because of physical handicap. Then he said “to me, 2 people is already a collective” and with this impetus set up discussion groups and other advisors on accessibility in internet development.

The most interesting point I heard about this was outside, at lunch after, from Stephanie Troeth, who has volunteered for open internet standards for 7 years (and who presented about the Griffin town project at the last Mess!). I was asking her if keeping your code W3C compatible is enough to make a web site accessible to specialty readers, and she said no unfortunately, not always, not quite, because many of those specialty readers for making the web accessible to users with a handicap are frequently closed, proprietary and not compatible with open standards. Oy, guys, c’mon.

Ok, that’s it for now, this post is chunky and I have to run, watch for Part 2 later, featuring:

Michael Lenczner, co-founder of Ile Sans Fils, Jeremy Shtern policy scholar studying the coming (maybe) regulation of the internet, and more of my notes from Gil and Prado’s awesome interrupty tag-team.