I’m listening to Leon Dubosch via a translator. (German is my best not-English, but it’s not good enough.) Leonard thought about projects that could be done in Linz.

Thomas Gegenhuber now speaks. Art reuses what has been created before. (He quotes Lessig.) What can a municipality do? Linz’s homepage is published under CC. Artists who publish their works under a free license gets more money from the government than those who don’t use free licenses. CC here is the default option, and that should be true for cultural funding.

Jakob p[missed last name] says free software is a matter of rights Protecting free software is a human right. Munich uses platform-independent software. It’s free to adapt it, free to partner, free to disseminate it, and has no license fees to pay. What will Linz have to do to be as free Munich: Decide to use open source software in administration, the business, and in education. Right now, all software in Austrian schools is Windows. Instead, schools should teach skills, not applications. Schools ought to have open source software.

Barbara Hofmann talks open courseware. She points to MIT and open coune.rseware. There are 200 schools that are members of the open courseware consortium. The Univ of Klagenfurt in Austria is a member. It takes institutional interest and organizational backbone.

Stefan Powel talks about web science at Univ of Linz. They want to pull together multiple disciplines, initially for a masters degree, by 2010. Bachelors degree by 2012.

Manuela Hiermair talks about overcoming the digital divide. We need free wifi. Communities can provide free access. In Linz, there are over 100 free wifi access points, and a public internet service provider.

Christian Forsterleitner talks about Digital public space. Every resident should receive a bit of Linz’s publis space, free. There are free storage offers from Google, Flickr, MySpace, etc. NBut you give up your rights and are subject to censorship. “We want public authorities to provide this basic service.” “We consider the Webspace to be a citizen’s right.”

[Time to move to Linz? :) ]

[Tags: ae08 ars_electronica linz wifi muni_wifi open_software ]