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Getting out of Show Business, FLOSS and Social Action in Brazil's Cultural Hotspots
This paper, more than presenting a case study, tries to outline the context in which groups related to digital and electronic culture, and the ideology that surrounds them, organized to influence programs of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. A brief overview of the history of Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) adoption in the Brazilian Government is necessary, even though we are aware that when this publication is out everything may have changed. Further, we present the story of the "Pontos de Cultura" (Cultural Hotspots) project, more than simple governmental action, it aims to reach geographic and social boundaries of Brazil with an integrated strategy of generating autonomy, sustainability, and network action, based on fomenting media production and free collaborative culture.
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FLOSS in Brazil
Today Brazil's policy of supporting Free/Open Source Software is world known. President Lula da Silva's current government has a public position on the adoption of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) in its administration, having criticized the previous administration about the amount of money paid annually in royalties to international software companies. International attention culminated when Wired magazine published an article called "The Open Source Nation of Brazil" (Wired 12.11.04). Currently, two huge government programs claim they will bring FLOSS to the masses, "PC-Conectado" and "The $100 Laptop". The first will retail $500 computers with FLOSS and subsided internet access. The second, plans to design and produce laptops costing $100 to distribute to school children. The government also has plans to migrate all it's infrastructure to FLOSS.
Nonetheless, despite all the hype in the press, a strong position has been seen more in politic forums and promises than in real state management actions.
Some migrations have occurred, but many were not successful. Most of the managers in the technological sector of the government are outdated since they have been occupying a public job that gives, after a few years, tenure and the safety of not being fired, in this context the choice for a different kind of software would force them to recycle their whole technical formation, bringing much resistance to these migrations.
This factor, between many others, made the political position of the government contradict governmental practice. Most projects are still on paper, beside of much that is being spoken internationally about Brazil, few efforts, in practice, have proven to be real adoption of FLOSS in government and have not reached the population. Also, all the exposition that the current political scandals get on the media, threatens the future of FLOSS in Brazil, giving space to all kinds of disinformation tactics and FUD from Software production Multinacionals protecting their economic interests.
There are successes in more local levels, there have been many telecenter efforts to present FLOSS to the population. The most remarkable is the City of Sao Paulo experience where the amount of people contemplated with Internet access and possibilities of computer usage was very expressive: more than half a million registered users in a network of over a hundred telecenters. And in particular, there is the Cultural Hotspots project, which, due to it's very peculiar history, is being implemented throughout Brazil without bringing much attention to itself.
Pontos de Cultura, forging a group from a collective process
Gilberto Gil, a famous brazilian popstar, assumes the Ministry of Culture in Lula's government. In the first months in action the Ministry of Culture (MinC) helped fund an event in Sao Paulo named Tactical Media Brazil. In this event, Claudio Prado, an old friend of Gil's and a strong articulator, decided to exchange some ideas with Gil. Claudio would like to present a project to the just-installed Ministry of Culture.
At this event Richard Barbrook and John Perry Barlow were also present. Barlow's presence was key, since he decided to spend some time in Brazil, keeping a strong contact with the Minister, and influencing many of Gil's positions in respect to technology.
Gil already had an interest for the subject, and went deep in it. He declared himself a hacker. Hermano Vianna - an anthropologist interested in technology and cultural production - also influenced his positioning. Claudio Prado met some members of the staff of the organization of Tactical Media Brazil and invited them to his house to establish a line of action.
Claudio Prado then started to go to Brasilia and hacked into a project named BAC (Culture Access Bases). Two months after the brazilian Tactical Media Lab, Claudio Prado went to the second workshop of digital inclusion organized by the government. This workshop makes lot's of noise, but it was only pure steam. Claudio then starts showing some people papers that he called a "confidential project", architectural plants of a building to be occupied, with audience, studios, a library, a coffee-shop and other things, it was the plans for a BAC. In the workshop, he speaks about digital inclusion and says that "sem tesão não há inclusão" [without getting horny there would be no inclusion].
Directly after the 4th International Workshop on Free Software in Porto Alegre, he invites some people that were interested in the BACs project to his apartment in São Paulo, to discuss new ideas that could be incorporated to the Cultural Access Bases.
In this meeting, young activists, hackers and artists gathered to discuss what the BACs could become, although nobody really understood what that crazy grayhead hippie, speaking on behalf of the ministry, really wanted.
Even so, the possibility to create a way to materialize their ideas in a national scale served as a catalyzer that brought together a great group of actors of distinct origins, coming from different collectives that in some way were working with similar goals. Some of them already had experience in collaborative projects and in networked social action, but never in a federal scale.
Quickly, collaborative tools became a need and a e-mail list named Articuladores was created, easily connecting people from different regions of the country. Some time after, a wiki was created, three most of the project has been collectively discussed and written, from its structural and architectural design, to the technical specifications of software and hardware that would be used in, from the rules of global management to the way the relation between Internet users should be.
Civil society practically rewrote the BAC project. This all happened with no central planing, even without selection of the people that were getting into it. The mailing list and the wiki made it easy for anyone that heard about the project to join and participate. The group became a mix of people that had never meet face to face and, even in this chaotically dynamics the list and the wiki were very productive.
Production was done in this collaborative based system, built in principles of equality of voice and wide freedom of opinion. Many people that became part of this group already militated in movements, collectives and projects related to media, art, technology, what made most of them previously prepared to be in this kind of collective authoring production situation.
Most of them were waiting for the chance that seemed to be appearing at that moment. With all the excitement, the exchange rhythm online was overwhelming. The list, even now, keeps an average of 15 messages a day. Lots of e-mails were exchanged, and many pages in wiki and meetings were making the whole project more and more dynamic. The most dynamic it got, more people were joining. People with varied profiles and interests, volunteers that wanted to see a government project that would really use FLOSS to reach people. It was pure creativity. Everybody was looking to consolidate a proposal that would allow the reproduction in national scale of an ideal environment and a collaborative style of production only tried by those individuals in small groups away from the state structure. They were talking about the creation of coordinated and de-centralized HackLabs, that would also contemplate multimedia production and MetaReciclagem - hardware re-appropriation.
All the work at the wiki and the list, after some time, consolidated two great proposals named BAC (Culture Access Bases) and BIC (Brazil, India and China). The BACs were thought to be great centres of production, distribution and exhibition of free knowledge and the formation of thinkers inside a collective and horizontal perspective of production. BIC was a project that would try to integrate technology and production in south-south cooperation in order to create an approximation between rising economies as an attempt to consolidate a new order against the current model of established info-politics, and, ironically, sustained by government of a country known for its endemic corruption and inefficiency.
Grassroots: from top-down revolution to spread guerrilla action
Unlikely, these projects never became real. The projects were sent to the Ministry, but the politicians behind it simply ignored the result of all the collective work. The BAC project´s idea of building big centres in big Brazilian cities was too expensive and would demand a huge infrastructure of equipment, security and technical personnel. The secretaryl responsible for the project, after ignoring all the information that we sent him as a free civil-society consultancy, was accused of corruption. Gil fired him, and the project was put aside.
But the energy that resulted in the BAC and BIC projects remained in the air. The people that helped build the idea wanted to see it trough. Soon, another project toke the place of the BACs in the Ministry. A new idea, an idea thought to reach every little corner of the country. A decentralized network of cultural producers exchanging experience about the most diverse Brazilian cultural context. This new project was called Pontos de Cultura (Cultural Hotspots), and this time the politician behind it came into contact with the people that had helped re-formulate the BAC project.
Claudio Prado points out the nature of the project in his presentation at What The Hack:" Estudio Livre is the root of our multimedia kit that we are distribuiting in underpriviledged areas as a form to jump from the 19th century directly to the 21st century, bypassing the dead-ends of the 20 century. We have a big interest in expose our projects specially in search of synergy around the world. Our project is both governmental and non governmental at the same time. It is unique in the sense that it empowers activist movements in an anarchical process of building "isles" of free knowledge...I believe that it is exactly to the point of what the hack is going on in brazil..."
A Cultural Hotspot, at the same time produces and consumes culture. It is a house, a room, a warehouse, a physical structure placed strategically anywhere that there is local cultural production. The purpose of the project is to gather this cultural production, and irradiate its content to all HotSpots around the country (there are already 262 selected spots and they turn into more than 400 by the end of 2006), also, to give a basic infrastructure to allow people to produce cultural artifacts using FLOSS, and to distribute these artifacts in the hotspot's network, all trough Creative Commons and Copyleft licenses, in a way to allow remixing and collaborating with the other hotspots.
The Hotspots project also aims to reach places of social exclusion and poverty, this means that many projects just can´t afford any hardware or software that they might need to do their cultural production. The need for hardware can be solved applying the idea of MetaReciclagem: using used computers to build useful ones, recycling e-waste. The need for software can be solved by adopting FLOSS, not only because it's free (as in beer), but also because it's free (as in freedom). We expect that every user is an potential producer. No barrier should forbid the user to look inside the systems and learn/understand how it´s work. People in Cultural Hotspots can exchange their cultural production, be it as songs or movies, or as software.
FLOSS, Meta-Recicling and the Brazilian Culture.
Most of the people that were thinking the BAC project where excited to be a part of the Pontos de Cultura project. This could be explained by many reasons, most of them related with the practical point that this was the only way to see some of these ideas becoming reality, a step further than some of the isolated practices that they already realized. The group of people that started all this collective thinking/working effort, if analysed closely, has no strong commitment to the government goals or its ideology. This doesn't mean that they don't consider the project's essentially politic nature, but that they try to use this to act as hackers inside the system, self-organizing towards very specific objectives. Most of these people just want to see the thing done, autonomous, sustainable, cultural hotspots acting in network all over the country, collaborating and sharing free cultural production.
One of the strongest characteristics of this new project, and, maybe, one issue that had made a lot of people keep their support to the idea, even during periods where budget, payment and any other kind of reward seemed completely unknown, was the faith that once the whole process started, the network built between the HotSpots and its participants all over the country would be self sufficient, without the need of government support for its maintenance.
This belief in the self-sustainability of the whole thing, even after a Government change, is based in three strong points that we are going to detail, experience, the nature of the Brazilian way of network social action, and an element of the Brazilian´s culture know as “jeitinho brasileiro”.
From experience the group new that their concept worked. Most kept acting in network, and realized, among other things, two events that gathered artists, techs artists and media activists, "SinapseDigital" and "DigitoFagia"; the AutoLabs project and also a laboratory during the World Social Forum.
The AutoLabs experience was a proof of concept, it is detailed in Ricardo Rosas article published on Sarai Reader 04: "It is important to emphasize here that the specific methodology for each project that enters the lab will be proposed and realized by the individuals, groups and collectives them- selves. This will be done echoing the theories and practices relating to the development of an independent media culture allied to social initiatives and organizations, that they them- selves evolve as they engage creatively with new technologies. The groups involved are very varied, ranging from broad-based independent media organizations to specialized musical producers.".
David Garcia also mentions this initiative: "By the end of June 2004 were new three media centers have been established not only based not only on open free software but also on autonomous beliefs and practices. The fact that we are not simply witnessing another NGO exercise in community education was evident by the fact that some of the instructors were winding up the project, with a live practical demonstration of how to make pirate television."
A laboratory of free knowledge during the World Social Forum, in Porto Alegre, January 2005, was also organized by the many collectives. Lawrence Lessig wrote about his visit to this lab in his blog: "After lunch, I visited the Youth Camp at the WSF, where 50,000 tents, and 80,000 kids are participating in WSF events. At the core was a Free Software lab, with about 50 machines, all running GNU/Linux, and constant lessons about how to set the systems up, how do to audio, and video editing, how to participate in free software communities. This was organized totally by the kids who ran it. Machines in shacks, hay on the ground, wires and boxes everywhere.
I got to talk to the organizers of at least one part of the lab for about an hour. JP Barlow and I peppered them with questions as they described their “Thousand points of culture” project — to build a thousand places around Brazil where free software tools exist for people to make, and remix, culture. The focus is video and audio; no one’s much worried about Office applications, or the like. It is an extraordinary, grass roots movement devoted first to an ideal (free software) and second to a practice (making it real).
They have the culture to do it. Again, there were geeks, but not only. There were men, but plenty of women (and lots of kids). They were instructing each other — some about code, some about culture, some about organizing, some about dealing with the government — as they built this infrastructure out. Think Woodstock, without the mud, and where the audience makes the music."
Cultural production, once dealing with digital media, is mainly based on information. Today, information can be shared and copied with very low costs. Whole movies can be downloaded from a p2p network, bypassing the whole entertainment industry infrastructure. Since we are dealing with GPL or CC licences, the intellectual property rights above all this digital cultural goods are not an issue and the authoral rights are preserved.
Social Networks have some defining characteristics. When we talk about a network, we are referring to a social structure that has no “head”, no centre, that is basicly reduced to nodes and connections. Connections between nodes are only possible if a communication protocol is stablished between them in a way to make a long term relationship (more in Castells, 2003). When we talk about Social Network protocols we are not talking bout TCP/IP or X-Modem, Social Network Protocols are the chosen media of communication and action methodologies.
Collective work is only possible if all the members committed to the work know how to collaborate in a productive way. To build this reality, a methodology (that should be adaptive and flexible to local realities) needs to be established between the members of the community. The ellaboration process for the BAC and BIC projects, detailed above, was possible, even without community member´s preparation because most of the people acting in that step of the process already knew a common protocol, a same way to act and interact.
Also, besides a protocol, commitment is needed. It's a well know fact that to commit to collective action one needs, more than simple interest, a belief that the whole thing will result into something. Also, specially about communities that are built using computer-mediated communication, some scientific papers, and the BAC and BIC project´s elaboration process, point that “three structural features are common in many of the case and can be regarded as the basic features required of any successful online community. These features are ongoing interaction, identity persistence, and knowledge of previous interactions.” (Kollock, 1999:235), in other words, people must see the community happening before a mass commitment takes place.
This happened because cooperation in this kind of communities are the way people define their own identity (Foina, 2005), what is one of the reasons for the spread of the Pontos de Cultura project, that is, to make people able to define their own local cultural identity, by a dialogic processes with the national context (what some people call, Interactionist perspective - see Mead, 1982), sharing this with different cultural contexts of different locations inside Brazil.
By this way, the first step, the construction of the network itself is the key to start the whole process. Once working, this is a network that will connect cultural producers, digital artists, FLOSS developers and computer technicians in a way to create, in terms of know-how, a self-sustainable social structure.
But, this could drown into the sea of the forgetness without physical-hardware infrastructure to keep all connections in place. The basic infrastructure is also being implemented together with the whole social effort, but it would need maintenance, for which the needed knowledge can be found inside the social network itself, and, often, replacement.
Replacement is what bring us to the second issue pointed earlier in this paper as a Brazilian characteristic. Brazilian culture is not the issue here, but one strong national urban identity is based, beside of some other issues, in the ability that most of the Brazilians have (or believe to have) of finding solutions in the most adverse situations, mainly improvising with the available resources. This is called “Jeitinho Brasileiro” (in a free translation, "the brazilian way"). In academical terms this means that we keep finding creative ways to convert an abundant resource, time, in an very rare resource, materials. Applying this idea to the hardware infrastructure of the social network that the implementation of the Pontos de Cultura project is building, results in the fusion of the MetaReciclagem methodology to the whole thing as a way to guarantee the functioning of the communication channels and computer infrastructure after a possible lack of governmental funding.
This cultural characteristic named as “jeitinho brasileiro” is not only applied to hardware, but, once applied to FLOSS, it seems very similar to the Levy (1984) and Stallman (2002) concept of hacking.
We believe that trough out action we have hacked a project in the Brazilian government, and that this project has a chance to succeed. Now, we need more people to help us, we need to find more knowledge in these types of action, we need to learn, to teach. We need bandwidth and computers, we need funding. But most of all, we need to collaborate with other groups that are interested in ICT4D, and now that despite all the hype, only local, focused action, can have a real social impact.
Bibliographic References
CASTELLS, Manuel. “La Sociedad Red. Un Marco Analítico” in CASTELLS, Manuel, GIDDENS, Anthony e TOURAINE, Alain. Teorias para una nueva sociedad, Madrid: Fundación Marcelino Botin, 2003.
FOINA, A. G. FLOSS e ORKUT: Por uma teoria social do ciberespaço brasileiro, [trabajo de investigacion del doctorado de Proceso de Cambio en la Sociedad Actual] Universidad de Salamanca, not published, 2005.
GARCIA, David, Fine Young Cannibals, of Brazilian Tactical Media posted on openflows.org, 10/09/04. http://openflows.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/1a0/167212&mode=thread&tid=23
LEVY, Steven. Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution, USA: Penguin, 2001.
LESSIG, Lawrence. "returning home" from his Blog: http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002411.shtml
MEAD, G. H. Espiritu, persona y sociedad, Barcelona: Paidós, 1982.
ROSAS, Ricardo. "The Revenge of Low-tech: Autolabs, Telecentros and Tactical Media in São Paulo". Sarai Reader 2004.
STALLMAN, Richar. “On Hacking” in Richard Stallman's home page. 2002.
KOLLOCK, Peter. “”The economies of online cooperation: gift and public goods in cyberspace” in Smith, Marc A. and Kollock, Peter. (ed.) Communities in Cyberspace, Routledge: London, 1999.
WIRED, "The Open Source Nation of Brazil" in Wired Magazine, Issue 12.11, November, 2004.
Authors
Alexandre Freire, is a researcher at IPTI, and currently coordinates the Digital Culture aspects of the Cultural HotSpots project, for the Ministry of Culture in Brazil (alexandre.freire@minc.gov.br)
Ariel G. Foina is a Social Activist, works with the NGO Universidade Cidadã in Brazil and is a Phd Student at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. (arielfoina@gmail.com)
Felipe Fonseca is co-founder of the MetaReciclagem project and is one of the first articulators of Digital Culture on the Cultural Hotspots project. (felipe@metareciclagem.com.br).
This work is CopyLeft.
