ART ACTIVISM + TECHNOLOGY IN THE AGE OF CORPORATE GLOBALISM
presented by FREE.THE.MEDIA!

VIEW THE NETCAST FROM THE
---"FREE.THE.MEDIA! SUMMIT"!---

ESTABLISHING DEMOCRACY IN CYBERSPACE AND RECLAIMING PUBLIC SPACE ON THE NET

Netcast LIVE on Saturday March 9, 2002 (7pm-2am EST)
From: Name.Space Lab,
11 East 4th St. 2Fl, New York City

Howard Rheingold
and Paul Garrin

A telephone conversation about preserving democracy and building communities online.

Paul,

I support what you are doing, would like to help, have a few things 
to say about these issues, but I am not available for this event 
(it's only a week away, as you know). Perhaps I could help talk about 
some of these issues in the future?  The only possibility I can see 
is if I do a short, like fifteen minute, phone-in before 9:30 AM 
Pacific Time. After that, I'm not available all day.							

>Dear Howard,
>
>We're having a symposium next Saturday 03.09.02
>to coincide with the ICANN proceedings in Ghana
>(our event will precede the start of ICANN, and
>  will contiune online during it).  In light of
>the recent announcement by ICANN CEO Stuart Lynn
>that their 'experiment' with cyberdemocracy has
>failed, the net appears to be in danger of inverting
>from the many to many phenomenon that you've
>written about, back to the centralized broadcast
>control model, with the controls in the hands of
>a few rather than in the hands of the people.
>
>In our last symposium, held on 02.02.02 with JP
>Barlow and Saskia Sassen (you can see the netcast
>at http://freethemedia.org/netcast) we talked about
>the disappearance of public space on the internet
>and how we can develop communities to build and
>gain access to infrastructure, to route around
>the 'corporate globalization' of the net and media
>communications in general.  One of the key concepts
>for organizing communities and generating an
>economy to sustain the infrastructure, is to
>organize around new toplevel domains, including
>'.community', as well as other expressive domains
>like '.now' (i.e. stopglobalwarming.now) etc.
>Recently, I have been contacted to work with
>community boards and the city council of NY to
>gain global recognition for the TLD '.NYC' that
>we at Name.Space published back in 1996.  The
>community sees the value in local identity and
>how a TLD can serve the purpose of local community
>(and even 'translocal') organizing over the networks.
>
>Given your extensive work on the subject of online
>communities (to say the least!) your views are vital
>to the debate. It would be a great honor if you could
>join us live, if you're in NYC on 03.09.02, or via the net by
>teleconferencing a/v means, chat or voip.  If you
>can't make it live, then please consider commenting
>on what may be the inversion of the many to many model,
>or at least a serious constraining of it by current
>trends in so-called 'governance'.
>
>The questions that we are asking participants to
>cover are: