Free as in freedom: Free and open source as a social movement?

On Friday, March 4th, Koumbiteers and community members packed the Bar Populaire for a joint presentation of Philippe de Grosbois and Antoine Beaupré. The subject: whether there is, or can be, a social movement based on free software ideals. Openness and transparency are more than technical practices that help create great software. They're good for scientific collaboration, preservation of knowledge, and cultural commentary.

Philippe and Antoine described several projects that apply Open Source software to open source social values. These include:

• Wikipedia, a transparent and accessible sum of human knowledge;
• Creative Commons, a copyright alternative that allows creators to license their work for distribution and reuse; and
• BitCoin, a digital monetary system of anonymous peer-to-peer transactions. It's autonomous, transparent, distributed, and comprehensible in ways that “real” currency systems are not.

Now for the meaty part: WikiLeaks and the online group Anonymous. These organizations apply Open Source ideals directly to political activity. WikiLeaks is a source of information that challenges hierarchies of power and knowledge beyond the internet. Their publication of confidential documents feeds an age-old tension between what the state wishes to keep private, and what the citizenry deserve to know. The internet group Anonymous threatens the status quo by uniting the political ambitions of a large, diverse and distributed network of people. Their protests against the Church of Scientology and support of resistance movements in Iran and Tunisia have pushed online activism into the streets.

So the internet can be more than just a mediating tool for offline social movements. Yes, free is more than getting nice software gratis. But online activism and nerdy ideals always risk never leaving the screen. What can WikiLeaks and Anonymous tell us about the future of social movements? What is the (cultural, social, political, economic!) potential of an open and participatory ideology? Can it constitute a social movement? Can it be freed from purely monetary or technological concerns?

These questions created an enthusiastic discussion, concerning the role of humor in political expression and open discussion; the tensions between long-term goals and spontaneous organization; the importance of non-technical types and real-world organization; the real meaning of openness and transparency (after all, WikiLeaks does have an editorial process); strategies against misinformation in the public sphere; and social movement based on sheer numbers rather than specific personalities and platforms. In closing, Philippe and other participants emphasized that free software is still a patriarchal system. Openness and freedom are ideas worth applying and diffusing. But without the participation of a diverse and representative community, it will be just another form of oppression.