by Hammy Goonan

I’ve been banging on to the board of the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice (ACDJ) for some time that we need to stop this copyright menace, that record companies were stifling creativity and culture itself was suffering.

This is not unrelated to my growing nerd status. I love communications technology – the nuts and bolts of it – so have always been really excited about open source software. Eventually I had even made the full time transition to Linux after 3 failed attempts.

More importantly, I was excited by the intersection of these technologies with democracy. A community of programmers, coming together to build software for free, it’s an exciting idea. This, then coupled with the user driven content that gained a real sophistication with the emergence of “Web 2.0”, had me bursting at the seams to run a campaign like En Masse.

But for some reason, I just couldn’t pitch it to the ACDJ board in a way that they would agree to take the issue on.

In December 2007 I was asked to give a talk at Federation Square in Melbourne on participation and democracy. The first half of my talk described what I saw as the barriers to people’s participation. The second half revolved around what I though was an exciting area of participation – the Free and Open Software Movement.

Afterwards a young self-confessed nerd came up to me and thanked me for the speech. But the question she asked me had me stumped. “How do you explain this stuff to non-nerds? How do you get everyone else to understand these issues?”

For a long time I didn’t have an answer. But in thinking about yet another tact to take with the board it dawned on me, it’s not about the technology, it’s what the technology enables (seems obvious I know). It’s the ability to run a blog with very little technical knowledge and become a pirate journalist. It’s not about the fact that the popular blogging software Wordpress is open source, it’s that this software enables a blogger to sidestep the standard publishing and distribution methods and publish and distribute herself – something that can only really happen with Free and Open Source Software.

Yes, the software creation itself is an incredible exercise in democracy, but only for those with that specialised skill set. The real democracy begins with the creation of cultural content that can interact with the multitude of voices that would otherwise go unheard. It’s the Iraqi blogger who uncovered the use of chemical weapons by the US in Iraq. It’s the film Outfoxed that was created with the help of thousands of volunteer film editors, and whose original footage was later released to be remixed by other.

It’s saying to the publishing houses, record companies and film studios, “I don’t need you, I can do this myself.”

It is with this in mind that the ACDJ launches our latest campaign: En Masse.