Hi there,

As you might already know, the next European PGA conference will take
place in France this summer, from August 19th to September 3rd. It will
happen in two parts, in a decentralised fashion: the first 9 days will
take place in 5 different locations around France, each with specific
themes in focus; it will be followed by 2 days off for travelling &
chilling-out, then by 4 days in a central location, that will be the
Tanneries squatted social centre in Dijon (home of the print hacklab
[1], among other projects).

A « digital struggles » focus involving presentations, discussions and
possibly workshops is being proposed in Dijon, during the decentralised
moment. Here is a first proposal for contents. I'd be glad to hear about
comments, motivations, participation proposals, before sending out the
final invite. Help on making this happen will also be extremely welcome,
since us "convenors" for the PGA conference already have quite a heavy
workload. Here are the sub-threads as of now:

- ALTERNATIVE SERVERS vs NEW REPRESSIONS

How can we collectively face new laws enforcing data retention on the
internet, to prevent our communication structures from becoming the
weak points in our activism? How can we build strong user communities
around alternative servers, to allow awareness and solidarity in case
of problems (since right now, most activists using our services don't
realise it's important and won't easily mobilise to defend it)?
Possible legal attacks, individual & collective responsability,
resistance tactics, etc.


- INDYMEDIA & THE MOVEMENT, MEDIACTIVISM, ETC.

There's a co-dependency between indymedia & grass-roots,
anti-authoritarian & anti-capitalist movements it emerged from; but a
new mediactivist "trend" is popping up around indymedia - dangers?
perspectives? how can we rebuild/ensure closer interaction in between
indymedia & radical social movements, etc.?


- NEW DIGITAL STRUGGLES, GEEK FIGHTS

Software patents, repression of peer to peer, IP & data retention laws
are attacking digital freedom daily; some geeks try to defend their
territory, and some new struggles emerge with difficulty - how can we
interact with, extend these fights? What are the perspectives,
tactics, etc.? how can hacklabs/open-access space bring together geek
& activist cultures and possibly fill the gap?


For more information on the conference, please download the presentation
PDF [2]. It is currently available in french, english, castellano,
german, italian, and hungarian [3].

For more background information on PGA, see the "plaisantation" [4]
document on the wiki.

It you want to be kept tuned about further developments around the
conference, please subscribe to the PGA-announce mailing list as well
[5].

Cheers,

[1]  http://print.squat.net/
[2]  http://stamp.poivron.org/Plaquette?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=STAMP-Plaquette-LQ-EN.pdf
[3]  http://stamp.poivron.org/Plaquette
[4]  http://stamp.poivron.org/PlaisantationEn
[5]  http://pgaconference.org/mailman/listinfo/pga-announce

--
d a r k v e g g y - gnupg key @  http://garlicviolence.org/gpg.asc