Claudio Prado, the speaker of Brazil’s secretary of culture Gilberto Gil, will pe part of a presentation about open source software in Vienna tomorrow.

Prado was counter culture activist of the 1960s in London and was strongly connected to the alternative press, pirate radios, and the production of the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury Festivals where he produced Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. He founded the first Brazilian rock production company called, “Dreams, Artistic and On the Road Productions” in São Paulo. He is founder and director of PróRio92, one of the leading NGO’s network in the organization of the Global Forum of the UN’s World Environmental Summit Rio 92. He is coordinator of the NGO Phoenix, an experimental project working to interconnect formal and informal education in a governmental secondary school in São Paulo.

monochrom and the Green Party invite you to join a discussion about Brazil’s open source and digital rights programme.

Here’s a short notice by Claudio Prado from July 2005.

Seeing that the burocractic ways of the brazilian government where cloged, we found a way of working together with civil society by leaping into the digital era and collaborating directly with different collectives, from artistis, indymedia activists, hackers to musicians, trough discussion lists and wikis in the internet. We created a concept for a government project that is joining many agents in Brasilian culture, aiming to create cultural hotspots troughout the country where local cultural production exists. The cultural hotspots will use free and open source software to produce digital artifacts and will distribute these using alternative intelectual property licenses and broadband connections to the Internet. This talk will portrait over two years of our history getting this project into the government and our current progress implementig the cultural hotspots.

“Brazil’s minister of culture, Gilberto Gil has launched a project called Points of Culture (Pontos de Cultura) that will establish free-software studios, built with free software, in a thousand towns and villages throughout Brazil, enabling people to create culture using tools that support free cultural transmission. If things go as planned, the result will be an archive of Brazilian music, which will be stored in digital form and governed by a license inspired by free software’s GPL. The Canto Livre project will “free music” made in Brazil, for Brazilians (and the world) to remix and re-create. And like a free-software project, it achieves that freedom on the back of copyright”?

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…

Where? Museumsquartier, Ovalhalle.

When? Monday, May 8. 7:30 PM.

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