That was the message sent via “text mob” that guided protesters forward at the Republican National Convention street march in 2004, relieving them of the panic that no doubt would have ensued when the plumes of smoke rising up ahead were observed. Text mobs also helped shut down San Francisco for 12 hours when the war in Iraq broke out in 2003 and the initiation of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine was signaled by the sound of student cell phones ringing.

Text Mob is enabled by open source technology, I learned this past weekend in Washington, DC, where I was attending the National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR) held annually at the American University. The key, someone pointed out at the Open Source workshop, is that using free software is like picking up litter – it might not seem like much, but it makes a difference over time.

From a radical commons perspective, I liked the way that control over resources was a major theme at this workshop. Corporations develop software using the free labour of programmers therefore there is a moral imperative to steal the software back. But even better than stealing, there is a need for activists to create our own tools, media and programs, and to support activist programmers who adopt policies to protect their users from having their data handed over to police authorities if raided.

Unlike Google, an outfit that centralizes and archives all of our data, radical information commoners, for example librarians, fought for the right to destroy records after a short period of time in order to prohibit sharing this data and violating the privacy rights of their users. Some people in the audience didn't understand why we shouldn't just use MySpace and YouTube since they offered the most visibility for our actions. As my friend Andrea Marie pointed out - there are smart ways that activists could be using these platforms to communicate our actions and political critiques. However, this does not obviate the need for building our own networks of communication that cannot be shut down by external authorities, or that would survive even if it came to that.

The most important thing I learned at that workshop is that even if you can't program or code or whatever it's called - just by using the software and posting to the chatrooms - such as this drupal site I often visit - and expressing a frustration or reporting on what ISN'T working with the software, you can help programmers build better tools for everyone.

i attended a number of other excellent presentations at the conference,including one on New Orleans - Lessons from Women Organizers on the Front Lines - with Mayaba Liebenthal, Amber McZeal and S. Mandisa Moore. The most memorable statement during this presentation was Mayaba's: "New Orleans wasn't a natural disaster. It was a state-controlled disaster." Relevant to ideas of property and the commons, the women attributed racsim and class to the almost total neglibility and indifference to relocating the black community back to their hometown. The great discounted land grab that despicably and predictably began after the flood dramatically changed the demographics of that city, possibly forever. But for those who stayed behind, led mostly by women's groups, such as INCITE, Critical Resistance, and Survivors for Survivors (based out of New York, but working to raise money for the people of New Orleans), the emphasis is on re-building the city - not in the image of rich, white developers - but as a model of ecological, social, and economic opportunity and possibility. The women spoke with pride about how New Orleans folk don't like charity - they perceive themselves to be in a power struggle, but they're ready to fight.

Cindy Milstein presented on "The Legacy of Freedom in Murray Bookchin's Work" as part of the Institute for Anarchist Studies "Radical Theory Track" on March 10th. Some of her reflections that helped me to reflect on the idea of the commons were questions about what COULD hinder capitalism and what models can we build that would move us in this direction. Confederation? Other forms of direct democracy... The most powerful testament to the idea of freedom emerging from Bookchin's proposed study groups and self-catalyzation is Cindy herself. A disarmingly sharp, compassionate, and revolutionary thinker, Cindy herself was nurtured out of her shyness into an extraordinarily convincing speaker and writer. Freedom and unfreedom create each other, she stated during a short digression into dialectics: just as privatization creates a new imperative and a new possibility to reconstruct a vision of the commons.

My own presentation was with co-panelist George Caffentzis (with his incredible partner Silvia Federici contributing often). If you haven't had a chance to read his work, I have an excellent essay of his posted to this site. You can also check out his work at http://www.radicalpolytics.org/ We spoke on enclosures and commons... Someday soon I hope to post that talk here....