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INFOPISTA CONTRIBUTION TO EXPO
- To: CARL MALAMUD <carl@radio.com>
- Subject: INFOPISTA CONTRIBUTION TO EXPO
- From: JOSEP SALDANA <72343.600@compuserve.com>
- Date: 28 Dec 95 02:39:29 EST
Hi, I received this interesting statement and proposals from the people of La Infopista / The Catalan Highway:
"Mr. Josep Saldana invited us to take part in the Internet World Exposition '96. We agree and strongly support it. The people working in La Infopista share the idea of the Internet as a new media committed to give more voice to the people and to build new bridges among nations and cultures. Any initiative that works in this address is welcomed by us.
La Infopista / The Catalan Highway is a directory of all the resources in the web related to the catalan nation. The idea behind it is to build up a kind of Catalan District in the web. Internet is growing so fast that we can identify it as a global megalopolis. Within this big city there will be a community downtown and a very great kind of districts. Not only based on geographical criteria, as our is, but also in common ideas or hobbies. This kind of districts are flourishing anywhere in the web. From gays and lesbian to catholics, form Irish or Japanese to basketball lovers or leftist. In the most cases they are working even if they have not an explicit idea of what they are doing. In our case we know and we want to construct the streets and squares of our community and we are doing that since our establishment in may 1995.
La Infopista is not only a directory. We try to take part in the daily life of our community. From our point of view Internet is the most powerful instrument for advance in the idea of "One Man, one broadcast". Humanity spend the last two centuries fighting for "one man, one vote", a struggle that we salute honoring those people, from Lafayette to Nelson Mandela, who spend their lives building the way to freedom. Unfortunately today the achievement of this goal is not yet universal. We support people in the non-democratic countries who are fighting against dictatorships and also, elsewher in the world, against racism, starvation, diseases and poverty. For us to end with the hunger, the ecological destruction and the war is the primary goal of all the humans, today. But, at the same time, we can begin to fight for a new step in democracy: the possibility of giving to anyone the chance to be hear. Internet can be the medium of a new community of equals in the power of their voice. It's a long way but we are trying to understand it. Last November catalan elections were held and La Infopista join forces with the newspaper La Vanguardia, creating "Placa Internet" (Internet Square). In this place the five leaders of the political parties represented in parliament answer, face to the public, the questions that people send them by eMail. Answers and questions were for all long the campaign in the website and La Vanguardia carry each day an article explaining what was happening there. Experience was terrific. People use this chance with an enormous sense of responsibility. No one shut or abuse their right of free expression and, in most cases, they send questions very important and cleaver to the leaders. In the other hand politicians pay respect to the voters and answer very frankly all the questions.
Experiences such this one, it is not the only we did, show us that Internet can be more than other media. All we are journalists with more than a decade of work in newspapers, radio and tv. And we can assure that very few times we found ourselves so happy and proud with our job as when finishing Placa Internet we did.
There is a lot more of initiatives we are working with but we believe this experience is enough by now for explaining the concept behind our work and the ideas we want to share with the people in Internet World Expo '96.
>From the work we are doing now we have two experiences that we believe can take
part of IWE'96. The first one is "Barcelona Capital Digital".
With the support of the most important institutions of the city and a group of
journalists we are starting a debate on the future of the new media, specially
Internet.
Our proposal is to have in Barcelona each month a journalists working in a
project on the Internet (newspaper, directory, real audio...). He will meet with
students of journalism, with our group and also will pronounce a public speech
in the Journalists Club. This conference and our opinions about it will be part
of an special page in La Infopista. Our proposal is to integrate this place in
the Future Media Pavilion. We could integrate in this place also an experience
we want to create with the support of the City Council of Barcelona, the
Citizen's Newspaper. This want to be the first newspaper without journalist. It
will be self-created using the files that a group of several hundreds of
citizens will write each day. These people will write about the things they saw
during the day, directly in a web page that will catalogue their comments by
geographical areas or by subjects.
Our second idea is to create a new Pavilion based on the resources sharing today the same idea of La Infopista. We believe it could be "The Communities Pavilion". In this Pavilion we will establish links to any directory like our and we can post news about things people are doing in a similar way we are. In this Pavilion every community (geographical, cultural, religious, political, etcetera) could have their room. And we all together can discuss about how Internet is structuring a new world more open and where you can be part, at the same time, of different communities -and not only of a single state or church -real or virtual. Internet allow the people to find themselves more freely by giving the chance of to choose from where they are. And also allow the people to be part of two or more communities at the same time. This is a good idea in a world where exclusion is a common thread for people being part of a race, religion or nationality. We understand our Internet Identity as a signal to the rest of the world, not as an exclusion to the other. All the resources in La Infopista are part not only of the Catalan District but also of many other districts. Cyberspace have not the limits real world have in this question. To discuss this concept of a new citizenship not based in the idea of being part of one single, defined and close, group but in the idea of being part of an open place where people interact freely just because they found themselves members of the community is the contribution we would to send to the all the people using the Internet World Exposition '96.
If you found our ideas interesting we will be happy of taking place in the event.
La Infopista / The Catalan Highway http://www.partal.com/infopista"
The people of Spanish webs in Pavilion demand if will be a logo of the Expo from 1th January, to include as a link in their webs.
I have prepared a press release to send to media next 30th December about the opening of Expo. If you have extra material I can translate and include.
Josep
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