Sessions at Wikimania 2006 with audio on Friday 4th August

The free knowledge, access to information, and free culture projects are frequently compared to the free and open source movements. Both groups share a similar critique of intellectual property, a similar goal of more freedom and access to information and a similar set of legal instruments (i.e., licenses) through which they attempt to achieve these goals.
However, through its emphasis on licenses and legal, many in the free knowledge community have neglected the fact that it is not Richard Stallman's famous GNU General Public License that forms, "the constitution of the free software movement," but rather his Free Software Definition (FSD). While the free knowledge movement, and Creative Commons in particular, calls for "some rights reserved," the FSD defined free software as software that respects the four essential and unreservable freedoms to use, modify, share, and collaborate without restrictions.
To date, there exists no similar definition of freedom at the core of any free content or free expression movement. On May 1st, the authors of this paper and others in the free information community (including Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman) invited the Wikipedia community and rest of the free knowledge world to collaborate -- through a wiki -- to draft a Free Content and Expression Definition that aims to form the core of a new freedom movement. This presentation will argue for the need and justification of such a document, present and justify a text, and describe the process and future of such a definition.

Do you ever try to search for that one fact that would finish an entry, but don’t know where to go? Do you yearn to know more about a variety of sources? Do you find conflicting information in various sources and wonder what to believe? If you answered, “Yes!” to any of these questions, then this workshop is for you! We will discuss some basics about conducting research by sharing tips about using public records, people, business information, libraries, archives, databases, and the Internet to find information. We will even learn about some sources of images. Since knowing how to approach research can be almost as important as knowing what sources to use, we will learn about some strategies for conducting research. The workshop will also provide some guidelines for evaluating information and strive to inspire discussion among the participants about useful sources.