Proposal for the Foro de las Americas

I think we need to be thinking about three areas and thinking about what to do about them.

We should seriously think about an "event" at the FLA that makes some very real decisions. I'll throw out a few "maybes" just to get some back and forth going on.

1. We should have like a half-day event or something or all day. Not the whole foro but not one of those workshop time slots either. - Un encuentro en el foro- .so to speak.
2. The participants in that event should be activists from all over the place...people who are interested in using the Internet and coordinating hemispherically to make that happen.
3. We should get ourselves a small agenda of things to agree on, circulate proposals and responses, etc. Just like a meeting. And then we should agree on it and then we stick to the agreements. We make these things happen.
4. We need to get some hemispheric co-sponsors for this thing and we don't have much time. MF/PL sponsors it for sure. But what about a few organizations in the rest of the hemisphere? No limit to the numbers. Rise Up? What about a few of the Internet organizations in Colombia, Mexico? Zapatistas? (they do a lot of Internet work...and they are MF/PL members). World Data Research in Cuba?.
5. So what I think we should do is have a meeting of some kind in this country and has out some stuff we want to propose. Like in August, maybe? And then we propose this stuff to everyone who's planning to come and there's a discussion leading up to the event. In other words, we aren't walking in there with some proposals from the US - we try to make this as collaborative as possible.

Areas/Topics to think about:

• Rights. Think the whole access issure is critical here. Privacy, etc. is important in certain countries but in others in the Hemisphere it has very little meaning because of access.

I think access isn't about whether the telefonica does stuff right because in many countries there are no telephones in large areas of the country. So what do we do? I think we need to start thinking about some tech solution that uses cellular or satellite communications in some innovative way. Political issue is to take control of the Internet out of the telephone company's hands.

• Usability. How useful is the Internet exactly and what protocols can/should we be concentrating on to make it more useful for our movements? Is email really viable? How "secure" is the web from government and other disruption?

• Independence and collaboration? We can't have our own Internet right now but Is it possible for us to construct and/or develop some areas we can control Hemispherically (for the progressive and people's movements): dns, data storage, web hosting?

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