A Call for a Techie Congress at the US Social Forum

Never has our work been more important.

A system struggling for its own survival, at the expense of humanity, greedily seeks to turn every idea into a distorted profit-making caricature of what it originally was.

The Internet humanity has built, under our collaborative leadership, is now threatened by a morass of profit-making schemes, rabidly self-protective proprietary software, and repressive laws that obliterate the spirit and letter of the First Amendment from on-line activity.

With their avalanche of limited, glossy and ultimately entrapping social software, corporations are profiteering on human communication while fencing it into a superficial, choiceless chorus line of faces and self-descriptions.

All the while, the human race continues to make and change history by using the Internet for the reasons we created it: the massive communication of our ideas and knowledge and the collective, collaborative search for the truth of our world and its future.

And it continues to look to us for alternatives, information and leadership.

But, while our importance has never been greater, we are also often alienated by the progressive movement's dismissal of our politics, thinking, perspectives and experiences.

In addition, much of the movement doesn't respect our work choosing to under-pay us or to hire large, flashy companies whose work doesn't build the movement.

Finally, most of the movement has no respect for the principle of Free and Open Source Software.

As a result, too many of us shy away from movement work. "Burned out" is now a common condition among prgoressive techies. And our political work has now been divided from our tech work.

And the movement loses the political thinking and leadership of a group of people who are the leaders of the largest mass progressive movement in human history: the Internet.

Now is the time to change this.

We want to build a set of principles that we can all share and that the prgoressive movement will agree to live by. We want to write and ratify an "agreement with the progressive movement" that is a commitment the entire movement will live by.

And the entire movement will be together, in one place, in June, 2010, at the Untited States Social Forum in Detroit.

So we are making this call to all techies who support the principles of the Social Forum to gather in Detroit at the Forum for a four-hour

Progressive Techie Congress

that will wrap up a four month process of discussion and thinking on-line around these principles.

After that Congress, we will distribute the principles to everyone at the Social Forum and propose them to the USSF's People's Assembly for ratification. On that basis, we will begin to build the kind of relationships inside the movement that will move us all forward.