Artists, activism and digital openness

MEPART is an initiative founded in 2006 to provide basic training and counselling for artistic communities, NGO's and third sector activists in Mexico City, on the use of digital technologies for the promotion of cultural projects. The proposed presentation exposes, at its first part, abridged theoretical explanations for the curricular composition of the workshop (2006 version) and its progressive transformation; specially regarding subsequent counselling of artistic and cultural promotion projects in Mexico, public institutions and NGO's; practical situations and classroom experiences. The second part is a general analysis of the project, after the proposal was confronted to practical cases; two situations are revised : 1) the first emission of the workshop in 2006 and the tracking of two artists and a starter NGO that finished their training 2) the application of MEPART's proposals for the migration of the 35th Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico) Promotion Department to a 90% FOSS environment, and the adoption of open standards for audiovisual and textual materials. Finally the presentation exposes subjective but analytical answers around three major questions / general problems when teaching and promoting the use of Open Technologies, Open Source Software and File Formats Standardisation regarding the work of ARTISTS and Festivals: 1. It's a known fact that current state of analytic tools and our understanding of symbolic networking through collaborative digital media, has no objective methods of evaluation, providing its absolute multicultural axis. How could we convince and promote standardisation and strategical use of social networking through digital means, without confronting common inaertia? 2. How to eliminate immediate practicality of non-standard technologies at artistic environments? (The “0A” initiative - MEPART's proposal for no the conscious use of commercial media creation software) 3. Notes for the creation of a set of drafts for multimedia created document handling for the use of Festival networks and artistic materials. José Serralde April 2008 Related topics: teaching networking, revision of proxemics, teaching communication theories, copyright, Debian Linux, SVG, ODF, history of computing since numerical systems, i8n, EFA and Festival Networks, L. Lessig, art studies in Mexico, state of FOSS adoption within the third sector, Hinchcliffe's visualization, , Complete submission includes: · CC licensed complete presentation text and PDF slideshow. · Complete bibliography. · First draft of complete MEPART's written recommendation for the use of open technologies within artistic promotion environments.

http://fkft.eu/2008/papers/serralde.pdf