Last weekend, I was in Vienna at the FYEG-Spring-Conference to hold a presentation about the “Free Knowledge Society”. FYEG is the european network of all young greens and young green movements. I talked about Creative Commons and the Free Software Licenses (e.g. the GPL). My Co-Presentator, Rafa, talked about “Green IT”, why it is a good deal for the green party (or for a modern, left-liberal party) to be engaged in the information society issues.

Rafa and me, we also connected to Sarah, a Free-Software-Activist – and also FYEG-Delegate – from Nantes. We decided to found a FYEG-Infomation-Society- Working-Group. Now, there have answered many young Greens (and green-thinking) young people from all over Europe. Thats really cool, because that makes us better connected. In the past, there were many actions all over Europe that were dealing about free knowledge, open access and Free Software – now we can share them.

Examples of actions that were done by Young Greens and conncted groups:

• Germany: Copy4Freedom: Campaign from Grüne Jugend (2004)
• Catalonia: Open Conference: What model of society do we want?
• Russia: Support teachers movement to get GNU Linux instead of Windows which is illegal in 90%, Movement to spread Linux in the schools
• France: Giving free virgin CD’s against the canon that puts high indirect taxes to every product able to participate in the copy of registered products, which is a criminalization assuming the use for copy

Hope, that this working group will start powerfully – these Copyright Issues and Open Knowledge Issues have to be discussed international, because we have nearly the same problems in many european countries.