Greetings!
Since the conclusion of the DiDIY (Digital Do It Yourself) EU H2020 project in 2017, this website, and the Free Knowledge Institute in general, have been almost completely silent.
The reasons are very simple: first, after the DiDIY project, the FKI has been actively involved in creating various commons-cooperative initiatives related to the issues we all care about, that only in a few cases we found enough time to properly share them here. Then, the pandemic slowed down a lot all our projects, just as it did with everybody else around the world.
These commons-cooperative initiatives refer to the development of CommonsCloud, the open community network for the Internet of Things in Catalonia, the co-founding of the multistakeholder cooperative femProcomuns and the programme for commons-collaborative economy and Five Pillar network for Commons-oriented sustainability models (see our reports at OpenCoop 2018). In these last years we have helped set up these initiatives, while step by step bringing them under the wings of the cooperative femProcomuns. After all, femProcomuns was designed for realising these kinds of initiatives for and by its members. The Free Knowledge Institute has taken a step back on those projects, while still functioning as an active party in The Online Meeting Cooperative, or meet.coop.
During all this time, however, as a team we never lost track of each other, and continued to explore how to carry on the FKI mission. We all agreed that the first, but by no means the only things to do were:
- reboot this website, to make it more usable, accessible and easier to update
- make visible, and shareable again all the work made by FKI since its foundation in 2007, including many reports and documents that had gone offline during previous website migrations
- keep online, as usable as possible, also the records and achievements of some of the main past projects in which FKI took part
FKI is back, at last!
It is with great pleasure that we can announce, as a small but hopefully useful gift to all the advocates of “Free as in Freedom” knowledge for a more open, more sustainable, fairer society, that we recently achieved all those goals. As of today, there still are pages to translate or update, and some links to fix here and there. However,
- the website has been rebuilt from scratch
- Freeknowledge.eu now contains again everything FKI published in it since 2007, including, in a separate section, all the slideshows, reports and other documents
- Everybody can now browse again, for the first time in years, some static, but fully working copies of the websites of:
Why? To do more, of course, and to do it together!
The Free Knowledge Institute is alive and kicking. We intend to do as much as we can to pursue our mission, in 2022 and beyond. Above all, we look forward to not just share again our past achievements as explained above, but to work together with every other individual or organizations pursuing the same goals.
In the next weeks we will resume a regular publishing schedule, and engage again in Twitter, and possibly other social media. Thanks in advance for subscribing to our RSS feed, following us on Twitter or elsewhere, and of course for reaching out via email, to explore what we could do for Free Knowledge together!
Best Wishes and Happy 2022, everybody!
The FKI Board