Conference was held on 2nd Feb. 2007

Introduction to the SELF Conference

After the advent of information and communication technology human society is drastically transforming into a very different world. Perhaps, no other human invention introduced such a transformation, except may be agriculture. However, not many among us are aware of another parallel revolutionary under current that is shaping up as a novel cultural and political movement, tiding under the waves of the ICT revolution. This movement is growing at an unprecedented pace influencing the way how science, software and other kinds of symbolic forms are created, published and distributed. This culture is often called the copyleft, identified with the Free Software Movement, because this movement took off by an innovative use of existing copyright law by Richard Stallman, who founded the movement by publishing software under a copyleft license. This license is essentially about giving the four fundamental rights to the user of the software published under the copyleft license: to use it for any purpose, to understand how it works, to make modifications, and to distribute the modifications.

One of the major outcomes of this revolution is the GNU/Linux operating system (popularly known by its misnomer, Linux). This copyleft movement is currently transforming other fields of human creativity as well---science, poetry, music, cinema and other symbolic forms. Of these, the most popular success story is Wikipedia.org, the largest multilingual encyclopedia of the world. There are other, not yet fully fructified, movements such as public library of science, open music, etc.

We are variously bombarded by all the media mostly, often exclusively, about the various aspects of ICT revolution, but very little awareness is commonly found about the copyleft movement. The main purpose of this conference therefore is to bridge this gap and generate awareness about this revolution, and also invite far greater participation from all sections of the community. The conference will inform about the copyleft movement in general, and its relation to science and education in particular. We have very eminent speakers from around the world including Richard Stallman, who will address the conference from USA over a video conference. A snapshot of the gnowledge portal will be distributed in a DVD containing free software and free knowledge resources, including Wikipedia, to all registered participants.