A call was approved amongst the proposals brought forward by the Communication Committee of the WSF International Council in its most recent meeting held in November 2011 in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The call needs to be made for the developers and managers of free social networks (based on free software), communicators and communication activists to begin establishing a dialogue to help creating online communication alternatives for the WSF.
The World Social Forum must become a communication process by nature, the Communication Committee said. The tools used by global social movements and activists which are being pointed out by the social networks may inspire the practices of the WSF itself, radicalizing the original concept of shared communication.
The interest of the WSF process is in the communication practices of young people, from the Indignant movement to the Arab spring, the Chilean students and the occupiers of Wall Street over the world. Also, the dialogue between these networks on the Internet and the networks that create contents from their organizations and communities, from resistance movements to community radio stations.
The call to networks must be broadcast via newsletters and websites linked to the WSF process, as well as independently by several organizations and acting groups in the WSF so that the movements, communities and activists engaged with communication can participate in the open, horizontal and collective creation inserted in the commons environment and free knowledge protocols.
The approval of this open call has already started to reverberate among the developers of free software who will participate in the debate on network connections during the Thematic Social Forum: Capitalist Crisis, Social and Environmental Justice held between 24 and 29 January and the 3rd Forum of Free Media, from 27 to 28 January, both events taking place in Porto Alegre.
Vicente Aguiar, from Brazilian cooperative Colivre in Bahia, says that as well as supporting the adoption of independently developed platforms, communication activists in the WSF can integrate a ‘shared protocol connecting all those networks, regardless of the installation and database, in a big decentralized social network where each installation is an autonomous “federation” within a big shared network’. See also: A protocol for free networks.