• Communication commission discussion

Rio will gather free media for another communication. Participate!

de parte de ciranda@... on 2012-05-02 17:53
Rio will gather free media for another communication. Participate!


All the versions of this article: [English] [Español] [français] 
[Português do Brasil]
http://www.ciranda.net/fsm-2011-dakar/article/rio-will-gather-free-media-for

The II World Forum of Free Media will be organized in panels, free 
debates, workshops and plenary sessions planned for Rio de Janeiro. The 
formats are open. Translated by Malgorzata Chojnowska and Fernanda 
Favaro

Hundreds of representatives of free media are getting ready to go to 
Rio de Janeiro, in June 2012, to help to prepare the Peoples’ Summit at 
Rio+20, a parallel event to the UN Conference on sustainable 
development. They will work to spread the voice of the people gathered 
at the Summit, who instead of talking about the management of the 
environment by economic power, will speak about the ways for the 
environmental and social justice. These media have their own agenda 
within the Summit, where they will meet to hold the II World Free Media 
Forum, besides covering the activities and the themes of Rio +20.

What are free media?

Committed to the fight for free knowledge and for alternatives to the 
models of communication monopolized or controlled by economic power, 
free media are those that serve communities, social struggles, culture 
and diversity. They use licenses that favor collective use and not 
corporate business. They share and defend the common good and freedom of 
expression for everyone and not only for companies that dominate the 
sector. They understand communication as a human right and therefore 
they want to change communication in the world.

Who are free media?

They are activist sites and popular publications, community radios and 
televisions, culture points (in Brazil) and many groups active in social 
networks. They are also non-profit agencies, magazines and alternative 
broadcasters, specialized or focused on working with the guidelines 
proposed by trade unions, social, academic or cultural movements. Inside 
or outside of those spaces, they are also free media as people - 
journalists, communicators, edu-communicators, bloggers, video-makers, 
office workers, developers of free technologies that today constitute a 
growing movement for the right to the communication.

The II World Forum of Free Media

After three forums in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro 2008, Vitória 2009 and 
Porto Alegre 2012), two preparatory meetings in North Africa (Marrakesh 
2011 and Tunis 2012), a world edition (Belém 2009) and a Convergence 
Assembly at the World Social Forum (Dakar, 2011), the free media are 
slowly building their agendas, regional and global, which will make 
important progress in Rio de Janeiro, with the second world edition.

The II World Forum of Free Media will be organized in panels, free 
debates, workshops and plenary sessions planned for Rio de Janeiro. The 
formats are open. The activities will be registered and organized by the 
collectives and organizations interested in promoting them, within a 
collectively built program, and orientated by axes that point to the 
relationship between free media and the right to communication, public 
politicies, technological appropriation and social movements.

A global agenda is in construction.

The right to communication

The right to communication needs to be guaranteed and respected as a 
human right, but it is constantly threatened or even denied in many 
places in the world, with the use of extreme violence. One of the 
aspects of this right is freedom of expression, today assured only for 
the companies that control large chains of communication and 
entertainment, which do not want society to participate in the 
management of the system, and for the governments that still fear free 
communication as a threat to the security of the country or to the 
maintenance of power. The right to communication should be conquered in 
a full sense, beyond the access to information manipulated by the market 
or major powers, including global access and use of media, 
democratization of infrastructure and production of content, and 
expression of artistic and cultural diversity and full access to 
knowledge. The World Forum of Free Media will have agendas and debates 
about the right to the communication in different contexts such as about 
Africa and Mexico, for example, where violence against journalists and 
communicators has been a priority agenda for the communication movement.

Public policies

The Law of Media in Argentina resonated strongly within the regional 
and preparatory processes of the WFMF, like in Porto Alegre and in 
Marrakesh, with the testimonies of communication activists and 
researchers of that country, and should again be one of the subjects of 
the II WFMF, because it offered a more democratic model of legislation 
that can inspire other countries, and for the strong opposition that it 
provoked among the big corporations of the communication sector. But 
this will not be the only case of regulation and public policies of 
interest to free media.

To be held in Brazil, the II WFML should give weight to the agendas of 
free media of communication in this country, which means that the 
government needs to forward the proposals of Brazilian civil society for 
a new regulatory framework for communications, democratizing the sector, 
that the community radio stations should have satisfied their list of 
demands, with the amnesty for arrested and convicted broadcasters, and 
that Congress must vote and approve the “Civil (Regulatory) Mark” of the 
Internet, which can be a model to ensure network neutrality. Free media 
should also encourage the resumption of cultural policies that had the 
culture points, free technologies and "commons” philosophies as their 
centerpiece, as today they are in clear regression.

Laws, regulations and the state’s role in promoting the right to 
communications are already part of discussions of free media in 
different countries and should drive the agenda of the II WFMF.

Technological Appropriation

If in the past it was the alternative media that used to search for 
collaborative and shared forms to produce communications, today it is 
the big corporations that dominate the sector and attract millions of 
people to their social networks. However, the expansion cycle of these 
networks has also been a phase of collecting, storing and the 
transformation of personal data into subsidies to market and behavior 
strategies, besides the standardization of network´s usage in 
pre-ordained formats and the possibility of removing pages or tools 
according to corporate interests. Added to this control figures the 
copyright industry’s and telecommunications companies’ drive to approve 
laws that permits associating monitoring to arbitrary punishment of 
users on behalf of businesses based on exploitation and use of the 
network.

The freedoms and the diversity of the internet depends on freedom of 
access, the protection of personal data, the openness of codes, 
knowledge appropriation and construction of alternative connections, and 
also on self-managed networks. These will be the striking debates of the 
II WFMF that will mobilize free software activists and developers, 
supporters of net neutrality, educommunicators (people that use the 
communication as a powerful tool in education), workshop instructors and 
movements interested in democratizing the access to technology, 
universalizing broadband and assure the appropriation of communication 
resources, be it tools for video editing, network data transmission, or 
community broadcasting.

Developers, collectives and communities, adept to free and opened 
networks managed with no market interests, will meet each other within 
this axis to discuss a PROTOCOL for free networks, able to facilitate 
their interconnection without destroying their diversity.

Social Movements

The free media and the exercise of network communication have been 
crucial to facilitate the coordination and provide the appropriate 
visibility to the street mobilizations since the `Arab Spring`, facing 
governments in North Africa, the financial dictatorship in Europe and 
even the capitalist system in USA and the occupations that also take 
place in Brazil and Latin America.

Besides the so-called global activisms, the social movements have 
assumed that communication is strategic to reinforce their struggles, 
imposing a daily critique of the mainstream media and the use of 
alternative media as a way to talk to society and defend themselves 
against criminalization. It is increasingly clear that the right to 
express these confrontational voices requires the engagement of social 
movements in the movement for another communication.

This debate, in the II WFMF, highlights the fact that free media are, 
on the one hand, the communication that deals with social struggles, but 
they are also the social movements that fight for communication.

The II WFMF, the WSF and the Peoples’ Summit

The Free Media Forum, with its regional and international processes, 
participates in the World Social Forum process, adopting its Charter of 
Principles and contributing with subsidies and practices to build its 
communication policies.

In the Peoples’ Summit, the free media will use the concept of Shared 
Communication, built within the historical course of the World Social 
Forum and grounded in the idea that resources, spaces and activities can 
be shared for common media actions in the interest of social struggles.

In the Peoples’ Summit, the free media will contribute with proposals 
and discussions to reinforce the Common Goods agenda - in which 
Communication and Culture are considered great goods of the humanity, 
inseparable from Environmental and Social Justice -, and to make the 
right and defense of communication part of the documents, agendas and 
proposals of the peoples represented by their social movements in Rio de 
Janeiro.

Service:

II World Free Media Forum

When - 16th and 17th of June 2012

Where: Rio de Janeiro, RJ - Brazil, in the context of the People’s 
Summit for Rio + 20

Place of the activities:

16th to 17th of June Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Central 
Agenda with discussions, workshops and plenary)

People’s Summit Period: (15th to 23th of June)

Aterro do Flamengo - (Shared Coverage, Radio and TV Forums, workshops)

Aterro do Flamengo - (Convergence on Life Commodification and Common 
Property Assembly)

Websites

http://medias-libres.rio20.net

WWW.forumdemidialivre.org

WWW.freemediaforum.org

Ciranda WFFM



Regresar a vista por datas: Filado ou plano