Decentralized Remote Chaos Experience

Closing Ceremony

Cyberpunk 2022 Trust in digital communication
How We Founded a Citizen Television Station
Unser Weg zum portablen DNA-Synthesizer
US government demands direct police access to European biometric data
Kunst im Umbau
K – Kulturarbeit
Solidarisch essen, ackern, imkern und wohnen
Raum für die schöne Welt
Das Fediverse steht für Vielfalt nicht für Einfalt
Das Mietshäuser Syndikat und das Neubauprojekt Görzer128
Kunst und Kommerz, ein problematisches Verhältnis
Geschlechtergerechtigkeit und Making
Git: Let’s f*ck up history, and then restore it
«Thank you for your data» oder weshalb uns das Thema Data Analytics interessieren sollte
Real citizens of Rheinfelden living in an AI painted model of Jakob Strassers hometown
Metaverse und NFT

Machine Learning and Environmental Justice

Living Data and AI

Adnan Hadzi presented Machine Learning and Environmental Justice at the the RIXC Art and Science festival: ECODATA.

The RIXC Art-Science Festival: ECODATA aim is to explore the ‘ecosystematic perspective’. More than just rising awareness that living organisms are highly interdependent on each other and their environments, this year’s festival edition aims to reveal a web of connections that interweaves biological, social and techno-scientific systems, living and digital data, artistic and scientific approaches. 

ECODATA exhibition is the central axis of the festival, which forms the rest of the program, made in collaboration with Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics” research group led by researcher and theorist Yvonne VOLKART, (Basel, Switzerland). The purpose of this exhibition is to bridge the gap between technological and ecological as well as to incorporate technological issues into ecological art. This year’s exhibition will feature twenty artworks by internationally acknowledged artists working in the field of media art, science and ecology.

ECODATA Exhibition
Guided Tour Through the Exhibition
ECODATA Opening Keynote Session: Art and Science Discussion
ECODATA Artist Talks
CODATA and A/I (artistic intelligence): Opening Performance by the Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared
ECODATA Exhibition Opening
Session 1: Technologies of Ecological
Session 3: BioSensing and Ecosystematic Perspective (1)
Session 4: EcoAesthetics
Thematic Session 5: Atmospheric Experience
ECODATA Thematic Keynote Talk
Session 6: BioPolitcs and BioDigital Poetics
Session 8: EcoAesthetics and Data
Session 9: Living Data and AI
Closing Session 10: GREEN REVISITED – Encountering Emerging Naturecultures
Closing Keynote Talk
Closing Program (Part 2): PLA(N)Tform Online Exhibition
Closing Program (Part 1): FOREST GARDEN GREENHOUSE Concert

boattr.uk book & blog

boattr.uk book published with Mute publishers

Digital Arts on the British Waterways 

This boat book & blog documents our journey on our narrowboat ‘Quintessence’ and the development of the boattr prototype in collaboration with MAZI (for “together” in Greek), a Horizon 2020 research project. Boattr connects narrow boats to the ‘Internet-of-Things’ and allows for open wireless mesh-networking within the narrow boat community, by using affordable microcomputers. The main goal of this project is to provide technology and knowledge that aims to 1) empower those narrow boats who are in physical proximity, to shape their hybrid urban space, together, according to the specificities of the respective local environment, and 2) foster participation, conviviality, and location-based collective awareness of the canals.

This is an edited collection of assembled and annotated boat logs, photographs and video essays, manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘computer book’.

The boattr prototype was built on the MAZI toolkit and the capabilities offered by Do-It-Yourself networking infrastructures – low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and wireless technologies – that allow small communities or individuals to deploy local communication networks that are fully owned by local actors, including all generated data. These DIY networks could cover from a small square (e.g., using a Raspberry Pi) to a city neighbourhood (e.g., the Commotion Construction Kit used at the RedHook WiFi initiative) or even a whole city (e.g., guifi.net, awmn.net, freifunk.net), and in the case of boattr the UK canal network.

The boattr DIY infrastructures offer a unique rich set of special characteristics and affordances for offering local services to the narrow boat community, outside the public Internet: the ownership and control of the whole design process that promotes independence and grass-roots innovation rather than loss of control and fear of data shadows; the de facto physical proximity of those connected without the need for disclosing private location information, such as GPS coordinates, to third parties; the easy and inclusive access through the use of a local captive portal launched automatically when one joins the network; the option for anonymous interactions; and the materiality of the network itself. The prototype integrates existing FLOSS software, from very simple applications to sophisticated distributed solutions (like those under development by the P2Pvalue project, mobile sensing devices, and recent developments in open data and open hardware), allowing it to be appropriated by different non-expert users according to their respective context and use case.

Table of Contents

Research Journal

Adnan Hadzi

Boat Log

Adnan Hadzi & Natascha Sturny

Reflections

Natascha Sturny, Rob Canning & James Stevens

Videos

Adnan Hadzi

Images

Natascha Sturny

Resources

Franz Xaver & Anton Galanopoulos

Editor 

Adnan Hadzi

Authors Collective

Adnan Hadzi

Natascha Sturny

Franz Xaver

Anton Galanopoulos

James Stevens

Rob Canning

Tech Team

Harris Niavis – MAZI Programmer

Giannis Mavridis – Micro-Computer Programmer

Producers

Adnan Hadzi – Format Development & Interface Design

Panayotis Antoniadis – MAZI Project Manager

Mark Gaved – Coordination Creeknet

Quintessence Logo: H1 Reber / Buro Destruct

Cover artwork and booklet design: OpenMute Press

Copyright: the authors

Licence: after.video is dual licensed under the terms of the MIT license and the GPL3

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Language: English

Assembly On-demand

OpenMute Press

Acknowledgements

Co-Initiated + Funded by

Horizon 2020 – The EU framework programme for research and innovation

The Mazi project (2016-2018) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 ICT CAPS initiative under grant agreement no 687983.

Thanks to

Ushi Reiter – Art Meets Radical Openness, Servus.at, Linz

Vince Briffa – Department of Digital Arts, University of Malta

Clemens Apprich – Centre for Digital Cultures, Lüneburg

Rob Canning – School of Art and Design, Coventry University

Gary Hall – School of Art and Design, Coventry University

Simon Worthington – OpenMute Press, London/Berlin

Reverso: Favelas Arise at Escola da Cidade

Reverso brings together the workers of the Occupied Housing, surburban Favelas and those traveling to Sao Paulo from Central Saint Martins in London to explore MAZI offline publishing tools, Active Archiving, Photogrammetry and DIY networking.

The project began in December 2017 with Favelas Arise at Escola da Cidade, in the context of an open forum where each of the participating groups nominated by Sao-Paulo based coordinators Marcos Batata (Casa Redonda) and Nelson Che (MMRC) introduced their communities’ specific histories and the cultural, social focus of their respective spaces. This was followed by a series of digital technology led workshops delivered by a small team of London based researchers and educators coordinated by Central Saint Martins in close collaboration with representatives from eight favelas – Morro do Macaco, Brasilândia, Paraisópolis, Jardim Ângela, Favela do Moinho, Heliópolis, Diadema and Guaianazes – and Ocupação Maua.

These early workshops also covered ‘Active Archives’, a process of gathering and organising material related to social histories and ‘Photogrammetry’ an open/source 3D digital photographic modelling capture process. The aim was to provide practical methods for recording memories and social histories associated with communities under perpetual threat of eviction and displacement by making alternative technologies available, better understood and configured through customised toolkits relevant to the needs of each of the respective sites. In addition to free/shared internet access and offline communications these portable technologies may also enable community autonomy and self-representation. This website is available to the groups as a  Forum to support ongoing  network  building and for the upload of material related to their network.  The groups are self-representing and uploading their own content.

Use Mazi Toolkit BETA to help your community with communications and development of ideas and actions.

Configure the Mazi toolkit to present a set of tools to suit your needs. Mazi development work is ongoing and continues until end of 2018.

The Mazi toolkit offers a set of open source tools that each have their very own development group and community of users. Please read through the information held here in this WordPress publishing system. Administrators can login and configure this Reverso website

There are also specific pages here to introduce each of the tools and guide in their configuration and use.

Additional sensors and peripheral devices are also described and presented.

Extra tools and applications for smart phones and desktop computers are held in shared directories to support extended use.

Mazi Toolkit

The MAZI Toolkit is made up of three elements.

1. Low cost hardware, currently the Toolkit is using the Raspberry Pi computer. Designs for making your own hardware casings will be available soon.

2. Software and applications, specifically developed by the MAZI Project including a set of local web applications ready to be activated on the captive portal. The functionality will range from very simple communication services, like chatting, forums, wikis, and polls to more sophisticated collaborative applications for social networking, deliberations, community organising, project development, etc.

3. Guidelines and knowledge, including examples and inspirations. Installation scripts and step-by-step guides are part of the toolkit, enabling you to build and deploy your own network zone, to configure a user-facing captive portal, and to select and customise software applications.

Further information

In addition, you can directly access the Toolkit guidelines on GitHub, which includes up-to-date documentation: https://github.com/mazi-project/guides/wiki

You can support the ongoing development of the Toolkit by adding any issue with bugs, comments, and feature requests here: https://github.com/mazi-project/portal/issues

Mazi | Pilot | Installation | Tools | DIY

Firefox OS died

It looks like the promising Firefox OS phone alternative just died.

Firefox OS was publicly demonstrated in February 2012, on Android-compatible smartphones. By December 16, 2014, Firefox OS phones were offered from 14 operators in 28 countries throughout the world.

On December 8, 2015, Mozilla announced that it would stop sales of Firefox OS smartphones through carriers. Mozilla later announced that Firefox OS smartphones would be discontinued by May 2016, as the development of “Firefox OS for smartphones” would cease after the release of version 2.6.

D-Cent @ Nesta

Our friend Jaromil will come to London to present D-Cent @ the Nesta showcase conference.

D-CENT is a Europe-wide project bringing together citizen-led organisations that have transformed democracy in the past years, and helping them in developing the next generation of open source, distributed, and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment.

There will be presentations from the D-CENT team demonstrating the technology and highlighting key insights learnt from direct democracy activity in Barcelona, Reykjavik, Helsinki and Madrid.

The Internet Society in Netherlands (isoc.nl) has nominated ten innovative and interesting initiatives to receive the Internet Innovation Award 2016. Were very happy to announce that D-CENT Freecoin is among the nominees. The winner will be selected and rewarded on the 14th of January at the Internet New Years event in Amsterdam.

The ISOC Internet Award is handed out to an important new internet initiative. It is a sign of high social recognition of achievements to improve the Internet and its use.

IMG_8752_ed_webAll our team is honored by the nomination. We are happy that our work on digital social currencies is being recognised already in such an early stage of development,” smiles Denis Roio, better known as Jaromil of Dyne.org, the D-CENT partner who has been designing and developing Freecoin.

D-CENT Freecoin is a set of tools to let people run reward schemes that are transparent and auditable to other organisations.

Freecoin is made for participatory and democratic organisations who want to incentivise participation, unlike centralised banking databases. It aims to leverage the use of social digital currencies in a reliable, simple and resilient way.

Freecoin_1000x609

Read more about the Freecoin from D-CENT blog: http://dcentproject.eu/category/freecoin

The winner of the ISOC Internet Award 2016 will be selected and rewarded on the 14th of January at the Internet New Years event in Amsterdam.

The decision will be made by a professional jury consisting of Erik Huizer (SURF), Valerie Frissen (SIDN funds), Astrid Oosenburg (PvdA), Marjolijn Bonthuis (ECP) and Teun Gautier (Publeaks).

Entropical

GitHub

Austrian Surveillance Techno – 14th May 2011

Deptford.TV was exhibited at the LiWoLi festival, under the motto Art meets Radical Openness:

Observing, comparing, reflecting, imitating, testing, combining

12th – 14th of May 2011
LiWoLi (1) is an open lab and meeting spot for artists, developers and educators using and creating FLOSS (free/libre open source software) and Open Hardware in the artistic and cultural context. LiWoLi is all about sharing skills, code and knowledge within the public domain and discussing the challenges of open practice.

This year’s event offers an exhibition, artists’ workshops and – like every year – lectures, presentations and sound-performances.

Deptford.TV’s part of the exhibition tried attempt to identify and document secret (covert) places, strategies and messages in our everyday surroundings. We will use overt, co-operative tactics and practice openness and transparency to push the covert into clearer view. The participants of the Deptford.TV workshop produced a one minute ‘Austrian Surveillance Techno’ video which was then transmitted over the local TV station DorfTV.

A series of ludic interventions in downtown Linz. The narrative is focused on generating awareness on invasive surveillance technologies. Utilising cool and awesome ring-tones sounds!

“Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you’ve got to be wise enough to know when to leave.” Richard Lamm

“A real artist never sleeps in front of new technologies but deforms them and transforms them […]” Paul Virilio

The workshop  introduced participants to Surveillance and CCTV filmmaking where material and images from the Deptford.TV archive were edited to submissions from the Deptford.TV database. Footage taken from Deptford.TV was filmed during a previous TV hacking workshop where participants equipped with CCTV surveillance signal receivers were lead through the city by incoming surveillance camera signals. CCTV video signal receivers cached surveillance camera signals into public and private spaces and were made visible: surveillance became sousveillance. By making images visible which normally remain hidden, we gain access to the “surveillance from above” enabling us to use these images to create personal narratives of the city. The workshop looked at constructing a possible narrative.
Finally we did a ‘live’ hack and connected Ali’s Kebab shop ‘live’ to DorfTV under the title CC Reality TV.

  1. 11 Moments, EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! (Linz: Die Fabrikanten, 2011), http://exchangeradicalmoments.wordpress.com/magazine/

Hacking Suomenlinna

For the Pixelache Festival Deptford.TV offers now also the video editing software KdenLive. The Pixelache Wiki.

Deptford TV

Deptford TV: C/Overt operations with CCTV sniffing and collaborative open source video editing

Main workshop day: Thursday 10 March 2011, 11:30-17:30
Venue: Pajasali, Suomenlinna Island (+ Helsinki centre)

This workshop will attempt to identify and document secret (covert) places, strategies and messages in our everyday surroundings. We will use overt, co-operative tactics and practice openness and transparency to push the covert into clearer view.

Our main tool for this workshop will be easily to obtained, simple to use and perfectly legal video receivers that can intercept the data collected by small CCTV video cameras often placed covertly in shops, offices and other public/private spaces. But we will also use ordinary media-gathering devices, our own eyes and ears and our social skills to identify and record evidence of covert operations in our midst, whether this is capturing gossip and rumour about the Suomenlinna’s Island fortress or observing city planners’ attempts to ‘design out’ specific social behaviours.

The materials gathered on our main workshop day (Thursday) will be meta-data tagged and added to the Deptford TV collaborative video editing platform. During the course of Pixelache this platform will be used together with the open source video editing package kdenlive to create a series of ‘versioned’ edits of this material. We will also be inviting remote participants to contribute additional raw media and participate in editing.

On Thursday, 10 March, we are inviting participants to join a walk through Helsinki/Suomenlinna with our CCTV ‘sniffing’ equipment and senses sharpened.  No specific route is currently planned. We will determine this following a short introductory meeting on the day and shape the day according to people’s specific interests.

On Friday 11 March we plan to transcode and ‘tag’ the material ready for editing, and on Saturday/Sunday, editing will take place. We hope that at least some participants will be able to see the whole process through. The post-production will take a wholly open source/free software pathway, so this should be of interest to all those media practitioners interested in open source tools. for media production. As well as a couple of pre-set up computers, we will supply ‘live’ cd’s or usb sticks with with linux distribution Puredyne, and our main toolset will be:

FFMPEG
Easytag for metadata tagging
KDEnlive for video editing
The Drupal-based custom web platform for sharing edits developed by
Deptford TV: http://edit.deptford.tv

There will be chances to learn about and use all of these quite intensively across the entire time of the festival.

Please sign up for the Thursday workshop, but also let us know your specific skills, interests and all the times you are available to work with us during Pixelache.

The Deptford TV workshop is hosted by Adnan Hadzi, Lisa Haskel and Larisa Blazic.

Deptford.TV running Active Archives

During the active archives code sprint in June 2010 Deptford.TV got the active archives system installed, see pictures. Soon we will be running an active archives workshop in London.

Manifesto for an Active Archive

From ActiveArchives

This Manifesto is a work in progress. The text introduces the ideas and motivations behind the Active Archive project lead by Constant in collaboration with Arteleku, and was initiated in 2006. This project aims at creating a free software platform to connect practices of library, media library, publications on paper (as magazines, books, catalogues), productions of audio-visual objects, events, workshops, discursive productions, etc. Practices which can take place on line or in various geographical places, and which can be at various stages of visibility for reasons of rights of access or for reasons of research and privacy conditions. The development will take place during 2008-2009 and regular workshops will be organised to stimulate dialog between future users, developers and cultural workers and researchers.

Image:Event-manager-5.jpg

Creating web pages and displaying information on-line has become easier and easier for non-expert users. The Active Archives project starts from the observation that most of the interesting cultural archives that have been developed over the last few years have taken advantage of those new facilities for instant publishing, but mostly in the form of websites that mirror regular information brochures, announcements and text-publishing. Often, they are conceived as “We” give information to “You”. Within Active Archives, we aim to set up multi-directional communication channels, and are interested in making information circulate back and forth. We would like to give material away and receive it transformed: enriched by different connections, contexts and contradictions.

Decentralizing the archive

When we want to share with other cultural associations and groups/institutions, the challenge is as follows: how do “We” share information “Together”, how do we channel information through each others’ network, under which conditions? How do we produce digital content together? To develop common infrastructures, we will need to discuss what kind of licensing we prefer, and work on norms and a common agreement on formats. We also need to find a shared understanding of classifications or maybe first question existing ones.

Digital cultural archives today fall into two categories: fragmented archives and over-centralized archives. Fragmented archives look like isolated islands. Every institution sits on top of its treasure and tries to regulate and control the way it is used with at most offering a timid RSS feed. Centralized archives gather collections and resources from different origins but disconnect the material from its original context. Accessibility and searchability come at the cost of legitimisation.

An active archive is a decentralized archive which is not only open for reading but also for re-appropriation, comment, divergences, transformations. This manifesto is a plea for such a decentralized archive: an archive constituted from many sites and voices that keep their own contexts without fear of sharing, mirroring, connecting and using common protocols.

Owning our infrastructure

If public television channels decide to publish their archives on YouTube, libraries work in partnership with Google etc., why does the Active Archive not make use of the existing web 2.0 infrastructure? Flickr + MySpace + FaceBook with a bit of Delicious to glue it all together… who needs more? But to upload digital culture on the servers of dotcom billionaires might not be such a good idea after all.

However much influence the functionalities of Web 2.0 had in popularising the digital archive, we need to be aware of their terms of use. We would like to prevent that cultural archives serve as footage for ad-placement or as honey pot for market profilers and for this reason we need to make the effort to build our own infrastructure.

An active archive should provide to its contributors a clean and clear contract where the terms of the participation are fair and legible for everyone. The goal of an active archive is to produce more interesting content in the first place. Not to make profit in monitoring the users and selling their behavioural patterns. Only when the different parties involved own their own infrastructure and accept to share it, they can ensure the conditions for access without strings attached. This means open content licenses for all material stored, so that the conditions for use are clear for everyone. An infrastructure built with free software so that everybody can co-own the source code.

Distributing more than text

An active archive needs to go beyond mere text-publishing. Artists, cultural groups and institutions regularly produce video and audio images for various communication or creative purposes. It is necessary to take into account that media content requires different material configurations: they need more disk space and more bandwidth, therefore they require clever strategies of distribution. Peer-to-peer networks have pioneered large scale experiments with the distribution of audiovisual media, and it is time to learn from them.

Integrating audiovisual media is not just adding another type of file. It requires a new approach to navigation, searching, linking, subtitling and translation so that audio and video content can connect to text-based content because otherwise those files remain black holes in the archives.

Image:exchange-of-tools.jpg

Promoting re-use

The material that is made available through the Active Archive is thought of as source material for other works. This means, systems need to be put in to place to make referencing and re-use of the material easy, but also make sure that versions of the material can filter back to the place it original came from. These systems are partially technical, and partially cultural: a series of commissions, workshops, exhibitions and publications will inspire creative use.

Between tags and ontologies

To improve the search facilities, to group elements, to link them and to create new meaning and new experiences, an archive needs a system of classification. Librarians and archivists are used to work with fixed standards but the work produced and discussed within contemporary culture tends to escape these classification schemes.

An Active Archive requires the creation and discussion of vocabularies and taxonomies that can evolve, diverge or merge. These vocabularies and taxonomies should neither be brutally top-down or completely flat. The system should stimulate the sharing of common classifications, allow for divergence and promote the convergence of knowledge trees. Active Archive needs a classification system with a difference.

Moving through new gestures

Sharing is the principal motivation to create an Active Archive. This means that we need to update our assumptions about the users of such an archive, the sources that are used and the circulation of its content. An Active Archive is not a black box with a Download button, it is information reconfigured. And it has to start now.

Image:researcher.jpg Image:radiomaker.jpg Image:librarian.jpg

Cinelerra Server for FLOSS Manuals

The plan is to integrate the Cinelerra Server project into the Cinelerra FLOSSMANUAL, see http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Cinelerra/WebHome

What is FLOSS Manuals?

FLOSS Manuals is a collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools. They include authors, editors, artists, software developers, activists, and many others. There are manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source softwares, about how to do things (like design) with open source software, and manuals about free culture services that use or support free software and formats. Anyone can contribute to a manual – to fix a spelling mistake, to add a more detailed explanation, to write a new chapter, or to start a whole new manual on a topic. You can read and use the manuals in a number of different ways. They are available online in separately indexed chapters, and you can use the website as a reference base in this way. You can also view, download, or print each manual as a PDF file. It is also possible to ‘remix’ manuals to create a version that only includes specific aspects of a particular manual, or that combines chapters from two or more manuals in a single document. These can be downloaded and printed, added to websites, and used for any purpose. You can also print a manual, or an individually ‘remixed’ manual, as a book via the print-to-order service of Lulu.com.

What does FLOSS stand for?

F. L. O. S. S. stands for Free Libre Open Source Software. Basically, this means software that makes its code available for anyone to use, change, and redistribute under the same terms. If you’re still confused, you can read more below.

What is Open Source? What is the difference between Free and Open?

Open Source emphasizes availability of source code to software users. This means not only that the source code is available at no cost and with little difficulty, but that users can modify the source code and distribute the results under the same conditions. Bruce Perens wrote the original Open Source definition for Debian. Free Software emphasizes the freedom to modify and reuse software, which of course also requires that source code be readily available. Richard M. Stallman initiated the definition of Free Software as part of the creation of the Free Software Foundation and its GNU project (GNU’s Not Unix) to create a completely Free Unix-compatible operating system and set of software tools. GNU software together with the Linux kernel, plus contributions from many other sources, constitute the GNU/Linux Operating System, commonly known as Linux. So in practice the differences in meaning between the two phrases are not great, but they lead to some differences in attitude, terminology, and use of specific license terms. One reason for the difference in terminology is that “Free” is ambiguous in English. FSF has to explain that it means, “Free as in Free Speech, not as in Free Beer.” To counter this, the unambiguous French term “Libre” can be added in, resulting in FLOSS, or Free (Libre) Open Source Software. FSF maintains a page explaining the various Free and Non-FREE licenses. The BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license, for example, allows users to modify source code and put the changes under a restrictive commercial copyright, as Apple has done in Mac OS/X. Since most BSD users put their changes under BSD, it can be considered somewhat, but not entirely, Free. In addition to these software licenses, there are several licenses for documentation and other content, most notably the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) and the various Creative Commons licenses. FLOSS Manuals uses the Free Software GPL for all of its work. For details of definitions and available licenses, see

A Little About the History..

Adam Hyde started FLOSS Manuals while a digital artist. Adam had made a living running workshops on free software all over the world and had accumulated a lot of support material in the form of workshop manuals. In 2005 this material was put into a wiki with the help of Aleksandar Erkalovic and Lotte Meijer did the design. In 2006 Lotte Meijer and Adam Hyde applied for and recieved funding from Digital Pioneers to extend FLOSS Manuals. Thus the development and design of FLOSS Manuals as it is now started in 2006. This is the same year the Foundation was registered. Several digital artists were commissioned to write manuals on Audacity, Gimp, Blender, and PureData. The actual site wasn’t ready until May 2007. The first unsolicited edit on the site was in July 2007. FLOSS Manuals was officially launched at a party at Montevideo Time Based Arts (Amsterdam) in October 2007. In 2008 we created the Farsi version of FLOSS Manuals (http://fa.flossmanuals.net) and started our first Book Sprints. Now there are over 40 manuals on free software, and 1200 registered contributors and a healthy and active mailing list. Burmese, French, Finnish and Spanish language communities are currently being established.

What’s the benefit to me of using FLOSS and FLOSS Manuals?

By using free/libre/open-source software, you have the right to use, change  and share the software freely. FLOSS is also usually no-cost. You are not dependent on a big company to add features or fix problems; for FLOSS, these issues are handled by a community of software developers, which often responds more quickly. If the FLOSS community doesn’t address a problem that have with the software, you can hire a programmer to do it for you; this is almost never possible with proprietary software. Similarly, when you use free/libre/open-source manuals, you have the right to use, modify and share the documentation freely. Manuals on the FLOSS Manuals site are no-cost to use online. For paper copies, we charge just for the paper and printing, and a little extra to support making more books. You can also take the online version as a PDF file and print it yourself. You can also edit the documents on the site, for example, if you find things are incorrect, out of date, or incomplete. (You can also change your own copy, but we appreciate if you help us make the manuals on the site better.)