Richard Stallman, otherwise known as rms or the founder of the free software movement, will be in town for a series of lectures at UBC and BCIT. I have been reading Stallman’s stuff since I wrote my master’s thesis in 2003. Although he has sometimes passed off as a crank, much of Stallman’s work has [...]

Me ‘n Leslie Regan Shade@the new media panel.
Media Democracy Day totally kicked it this weekend at the VPL. The event was a good fit with the library, and the MDD fair – 40+ community groups set up to do community outreach and promote a more accessible media system with less corporate influence – [...]

Speaking For Ourselves: Media Democracy Day 2008 is a national day of action dedicated to keeping the corporate media honest and making them accountable. The Vancouver event happens next week at the VPL, 12-6pm. My friend and colleague Steve Anderson is the main organizer for MDD Vancouver, and I have been helping out a bit [...]

Last night I attended a free workshop at Free Geek called “How I stopped worrying and learned to love the command line.” Who wouldn’t want to go, with a title like that?
I love FreeGeek. I’ll just say that upfront. Everything about it invokes the New Society that I dream of, but picture only vaguely in [...]

Apologies for my unannounced (and unplanned) summer hiatus…
Last night I attended my first Net Tuesday, at Workspace in Gastown. Let me first say that Workspace is a cool place. I first visited it for the inaugural Vancouver BarCamp in 2006. The place was new and the idea underlying it fresh: a gathering space and workplace [...]

Things are wrapping up here at Open Web Vancouver 2008. It’s been an informative (dare I say fun-filled) couple of days here on Raincity’s beautiful corporate waterfront. No one’s commodified the breath-taking view yet, so that’s something…
I have to say, any misgivings I had about speaking to a hardcore geek audience have been dispelled. I [...]

Virishi wrote an interesting post about Meraki, the company that commercialized MIT’s roofnet technology. Back in October, I wrote about Vancouver’s Free The Net initiative, which is fueled by the idea that neighbourhoods can connect up and to the internet for free. With mesh networking, the need for base stations is eliminated as short [...]