Picnic06: the economic contribution of hackers

Opening sessions of Picnic06 in Amsterdam, a conference about creativity in crossmedia content and technology. The event is taking place in an old gas plant, red bricks and high ceilings and wood chips on the floor. A few jots:

• The mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, in an unusually good speech explicitly acknowledged the economic contribution of hackers, community access TV and internet activits. "And now those people from the underground are often running things over ground", he said.
• Discussion with Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab, maker of the synthetic world Second Life: it seems that the interpersonal behaviour in the virtual world, such as physical distance between people (between avatars) mimics that in the real world. No surprise, except that it is consistent with the gender not of the member, but of his or her avatar (a portion of SecondLife members have avatars of the other gender). (Stanford did the research).
• Sandoval County in New Mexico, where Indian tribes live, is being wired by fiber and wi-fi hubs, with a $10 million financing by the State. "If they succeed in building the infrastructure and getting services like e-health there, then it will be very difficult for others in other regions and cities to say it can't be done" (Esme Guzman Vos, founder of Muniwireless, during a panel discussion).
• “It's insane: governments built the roads and the canals and the phone systems - even if they have sold them all off again - and now we are expected to live with cable companies that not only own the cables but monopolise the content that goes through them, too". (Dutch serial entrepreneur Eckart Wintzen during the same panel).
• "If I'm a city and don't have a citizen blogging tool yet, I should get one soon, because it increases communication among citizens" (Joaquin Alvarado, director of the Institute for Next Gen Internet, during the same panel).
• "In the two poorest neighborhoods of San Francisco, 43% of people lack Internet access" (Chris Vein, Dept of Telecom and IT Services, City of SF).
• "Politicians should be more worried than citizens about privacy, because soon we will be able to gather and access data about water quality, about government performance, and put them under the eyes of everyone, immediately" (somebody from the audience).
• Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, announced the European Archive, which includes movies, web archives, and music recordings - including classical music  - because in Europe copyright protection lasts only 50 years, after which recordings fall in the public domain (in the US it's double that: if you call up the page from the US, instead of the "recording" section you will probably get a message saying that "your laws don't allow us to make this material available").

The day ended with a party at the Rijkmuseum, where I could finally take a closer look at Rembrandt's "Night Watch". The real conference starts tomorrow.