We Have (Had) a (No, Several) Winner(s — For a Few Days Now)
It took three days to make it official, but the kind yet a little slow people of Netznetz finally succeeded. Infrastructure will be built, cool new locations will see the light of day, whole communities will get a second living room, €50.000 will be spent.
In the beginning, one could observe heated discussions and nervous faces, but the more people joined our waiting, the more civilised everyone seemed to be. I’m sure the hired security guard knows how to deal with boredom though.
The weakest part of the event was also the most interesting one: the presentations. Most presenters are obviously not professional speakers, some didn’t even show up, others weren’t given the material they should’ve been used. I think everyone has learned from this and will try to do it better in 6 monts.
The crowd was seemingly getting bored/nervous during the last hour, but gladly most got woken up a bit by Esel, who started a wonderful attack on several projects. He questioned their relevance as backbone projects
, who are in his opinion projects that should provide infrastructure for more than just the community one is already part of. I think that’s an important detail the Netznetz community should focus next time.
The voting seemed to work fine, except for the humiliating fact that the presenters sat there and begged for the little coloured papers that would decide how much money they will get. I think boxes would make that a little easier and less frustrating. Contrary to the presenting part here, the voting one was quite nice: you could exchange your ballots and give more projects you were fond of your vote.
But let’s get to the results.
€9.015,87 go to:
- Artist in Residence: For a tighter international social network, providing basic human and artistic needs for artists from god knows where.
- Gustav Böhms Gatschhaus: as Johannes Grenzfurthner put it, a permanent CCC hacker camp.
- Roböxotica: The one and only festival for cocktail robotics.
- Cuisine Digitale: A place where producers and interested people in media, art, architecture and music meet regularly. Events, Screenings, Talks, Workshops and Exhibitions take place [there].
€8.804,23 to:
- einreich.plan: A new hybrid club/café by some of the people that were involved at the architecture project add-on.
- Project Speis: Event/workshop/party/screening/gaming/surfing space. All free! Except for the beer.
- CMS-Server: a CMS server for anyone interested? Wasn’t so clear.
- Transforming Freedom: Community driven audio/video “indexing” of material relevant for digital cultures. A collection of statements/interviews/talks from known and lesser known netculture key figures.
They certainly will be happy about €7.449,74:
€8.253,97 will be given to:
- Malmoe/fiber/Context XXI: Covering the digital needs of the printmedia.
- X-purple: The basics for the sonance artistic network which forms a flexible structure for the integration of contemporary art, culture and science-”producers”.
- machfeld studio: … an interdisciplinary art- and medialab founded in april 2004 […] working in the different fields of net-, streaming- video- and interactive-art. [They] explore the borderland between new and old media.
The highest score will get them €10.000,00:
- Metalab: The Metalab is an open centre for meta-disciplinary magicians and technically creative enthusiasts. The Viennese version of C-Base.
And finally, there are €6.476,19 for:
- q/spot reloaded: The wonderful and widly popular free hotspot at the MQW gets siblings in more green environments.
- d.construction.site: Based at the EKH, the d.construction.site sees itself as place, for communication and exchange of information, apart established media- and information-channels. The
One word: Exciting! They’ve done it. Congratulations to everyone. It was a really really cool experience and I wish everyone involved all the best.
Related posts:
it’s a shame that there haven’t been better presentations, because some of the proposals are very poorly written. some i just don’t understand. for example, if the gatschhaus is supposed to be a ‘a permanent CCC hacker camp’, that’s great, but the proposal just said, “i’ll lug my hardware outside and when i’m not using it myself, people can dick around with it.” almost 10.000 bucks for a CMS-server also makes my face assume a shape that looks totally wrong. of course it really costs that much if you want to have everything done quickly by professionals. but the proposal doesn’t say *at all* what it’s actually good for, and if you have a great project and can get a couple of people excited about it, could it be so hard to find a geek who’ll do it for a tiny fraction of the cost?
speaking of which, maybe i should join metalab. now that’s a great project. project speis also seems more interesting the more i read about it. when i saw grenz’s hilarious video, it didn’t look like much, but meanwhile it’s clear that it was among the most worthy contenders.
Using ballot boxes would only be less humiliating if you never open them :-)
Otherwise you still end up with a lots of projects who wouldn’t receive enough money and this failure would end up in the final result and get widely published. Which would be even more embarassing then they way it did it on Monday.
You could keep the result of the failed project secret, but it would make it hard to check if the vote counting was done properly, because the published sums wouldn’t add up.
Another disadvantage of ballot boxes is that it would make ad hoc merging of project much more complicated.
During the voting a merger deal basically was done by saying: I give you my Peanuts, if you add my name to yours an your project envelope (which where used for collecting Peanuts).
Another interesting fact is that of the 507 Peanuts notes handed out to the 169 participants only a single 10 Peanuts note was lost.
i think it was the first and really important step… and i can only applaud.
the net-community-based system to distribute net culture funding that we started here in vienna is…well…sui generis.
we certainly have to learn a lot. but that’s part of the process. i can’t wait to learn more…
well, it’s truelly a good thing that new spaces now have some fundamental resources for their (i guess) well meant efforts.
but there’s quite a lot that, from my personal view, tends to be forgotten or maybe just not to be considered: in all this postpostpost - i don’t know what - days we’re talking a lot about ‘redefining’ the civiel society, democracy, participation etcetc. . but one should not forget that in a relativly small community like the viennese net-culture-scene, a lot depends on *conviention*. yes, people comming together, talking with each other, making plans etc. finally results in new projects, new alliances. that’s alright as long as you always keep in mind that this is not basically a democratic but a *social* constellation. to some extend i would call this a *pre-democratic* state.
what we saw last monday night was rather a ‘bazar’ than a vote - ok, i admit, this might also be called culture, but certainly not a vote (any un-voting commission would have protested). but i must also admit, that i’m happy having experienced a process that yielded a *result*.
we should just stick with what it really is and stop pretending this is a revolution …
i’m not saying this is a revolution…
the revolution will not be podcasted ;-)
4711, i had a look at the source of that basislager site (as the page itself can’t be displayed in a modern browser):
“//Variable Browserdetection: is_ns4, is_ns5, is_msie4, is_op”
i declare the person who made that an idiot. you should be ashamed of that, instead of linking to it.
*lol*
i know the source-code. i know it’s a mess. i’m working on complete relaunch but right now i have other things to do.
i’m not ashamed of my website - it was an experiment from some years ago. i know it doesn’t display in opera but it does in safari and firefox, even though i know it hasn’t been built for modern standards …
would you mind if i declare you a lousy pedant?
i would certainly not mind, but it’s not appropriate in this context, because i wasn’t nit-picking about a negligible issue, but telling you that it doesn’t work at all. and i have tried the latest versions of both firefox and safari. i don’t know why or how this happened, but the links for navigating away from the pointless front page did not show up. now they work, some of the time, and lead to a mess that is terribly broken in over a dozen terrible ways. hardly an improvement. so hang your head in shame already, just for a while, and your sins shall be forgiven.
well, ok. no nit-picking in this place anymore (my webpage is really not the issue here, is it?).
just another little remark on the backbone-vote: even though i didn’t really understand this a ‘democratic’ (maybe pre- or post- but that doesn’t really matter) the result revealed very clearly where the basic neads are at this moment. no matter if and how this result was influenced by ‘bandbusses’ the money will flow in the right direction - which, as a consequence, gives me some confidence in the whole proccess (even though i might not benefit at first hand …).
you know, this proceedure seems extremely questionable to me. give a bunch of self-convinced archer fish a heap of money and let them wrangle it out..
when netznetz first started up i entered the network with a project. esel was enthusiastic but never called back about a projected joint event. nothing ever worked and nobody could ever really say what things were really about, when things would happen and who was doing what why. being a rather impatient person to whom it is more important to really conduct interesting projects than to dick around with non-functional networking endeavors, and the whole thing striking me as having as chief point mutual ego-rubbing, i ceased following netznetz. and so now inside of a week etc.
well, this is how things work in austria, to be supported you invent some crappy project and have the right friends. it just seems too bad that the ones who had a supply of weed sufficient to stick it out until the money entered the game are the ones with the least interesting projects.
Esel is out of the process for quite a while now. Stefan Lutschinger is the coordinator of the process. And it is **extremely** open and that was a problem for a long time. But now - after all - as you see, the people got used to the open process and are finally starting to cooperate. Austrian skepticism finally can FUCK OFF!
i’m so glad you are starting to coagulate! thats wonderful. are you doing anything else?