There is more to freedom than just free software. I'm a co-author in the German-language Keimform-Blog, a group weblog discussing whether and in which ways commons-based peer production has a potential that extends beyond the areas of free software and open content production where it has first emerged. It this just a phenomenon of limited relevance, or might it one day cover all aspects of production? Is a society possible in which peer production is the primary mode of production? If so, how could such a society be organized?
I also set up a wiki dedicated to discussing these and related questions, the Freie-Gesellschaft-Wiki (in German, too). Meanwhile, things have mainly moved into the Keimform-Blog, however.
I'm also participating a nice little project that puts some ideas regarding commons and sharing into practice, the Leihnetzwerk, the German branch of the Distributed Library Project.
Note that all the following links are in German.
While studying at the Technische Universität Berlin, I was a member of the Association of Computer Science Students (which is no longer active) and involved with the AStA, or Student Union (which is no longer what it was then).
One of my many activities was study reform, trying to prevent the conditions for the students from becoming even worse than the already were, but also thinking about how to do things differently and better. One result of the latter aspect was a proposal for a computer science curriculum centered around projects chosen and largely organized by the students themselves, where the role of the faculty is to support and guide the students rather than to steer and control them:
There are also some slides from my presentation of the proposal (which didn't have the slightest chance, as we had known quite well) in the Faculty Council.
See also History of Computing for a project where we put some related ideas into practice.
Since 1997, when I was a young student, I have initiated or participated in various "autonomous seminars", seminars or study-groups self-organized by the students. The longest-running of these is doubtlessly the seminar on Free Software, Free Knowledge, Free Society?. I'm participating since fall 2003, but the seminar had actually started one year earlier. It's no longer a seminar, but it's still fun :-)
As a student, I wrote a paper on the history and theory of democracy. In the paper, I explore several problems and dilemmas of the democratic models, among them the relation of democratic decision-making and a market-based economy. I conclude that if we take democracy seriously, we cannot have both, democracy and capitalism. While my thoughts have developed since then, I still cannot find a fault in that argument.
I translated excerpts from Peter Kropotkin's well-known article on anarchism from the 1910 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica into German:
My site also hosts a detailed bibliography on workers' councils and democracy of councils. I have not been involved in creating this work, I'm only hosting it for some friends.
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