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234751d1 CD |
1 | --- |
2 | title: Happy New Year! | |
77ac803a | 3 | date: 2016-12-31 09:46:58Z |
234751d1 CD |
4 | author: christel |
5 | slug: 2016-is-finally-dead | |
6 | --- | |
7 | ||
8 | Another year comes to an end: 2016, a year many will be glad to see the back | |
9 | of. For many the year has been dominated by uncertainty, by fear, and by | |
10 | sadness—a year dominated, in no small part, by the political shift on both | |
11 | sides of the Atlantic. | |
12 | ||
13 | And a year dominated by death. We have looked on in surprise as icon after icon | |
14 | has passed away throughout the course of the year. We have looked on in sadness | |
15 | as masses of people have succumbed to terror and war. We have looked on as | |
16 | people try to flee, in search of a better life, often not succeeding. And as a | |
17 | project based in the UK we look on as the government tries to do its best to | |
18 | put an end to our digital rights, to our privacy. | |
19 | ||
20 | Some years ago, freenode experienced a sudden influx of Arabic-speaking users. | |
21 | They came out of nowhere and there were lots of them. Their arrival caused some | |
22 | distress to the existing communities on the network at the time; freenode | |
23 | predominantly caters to free and open source software developers and users and | |
24 | we were all somewhat perplexed when our network was overrun by teenagers | |
25 | wanting to chat about girls and football. They all seemed to be connecting from | |
26 | Syria. | |
27 | ||
28 | When Aleppo comes up in the news, many of us find ourselves thinking about those | |
29 | kids and what happened to them. One of our volunteers invested a fair amount of | |
30 | time trying to figure out where they ended up. When discussing it recently, he | |
31 | shared his experience: | |
32 | ||
33 | > “After a few weeks of surreal crazy chaos we worked out that they were using a | |
34 | > Java IRC client - and internet café PCs - to connect to our system. They | |
35 | > didn't know what it was for or why it existed but they'd found real-time | |
36 | > online communication for the first time and were enjoying the shit out of it. | |
37 | ||
38 | > I first used IRC in the 90s when an IRC client was given to me by a friend not | |
39 | > very long after it was the medium for some of the first ever real-time citizen | |
40 | > journalism during the 1991 Gulf War. In much the same way that someone threw | |
41 | > some software at me in a computing lab in Oxford and showed me how to use it | |
42 | > to chat, these kids were sharing and collaborating in the streets and using | |
43 | > new tools to talk to the guy a computer or a block or a neighbourhood over | |
44 | > with equal ease. | |
45 | ||
46 | > While we tried to shepherd a group of unruly teenagers into a corner where | |
47 | > they would cause less trouble for everyone else, I got to know a couple of the | |
48 | > better English-speakers quite well; they seemed mostly to be basically decent | |
49 | > kids growing up much too quickly and experiencing my corner of the internet | |
50 | > for the first time. They were mostly in Aleppo. | |
51 | ||
52 | > As the Arab Spring progressed they grew in number and it was genuinely cool | |
53 | > watching them discover and explore. But as spring turned to summer and then | |
54 | > autumn, they gradually dropped in number and started to vanish. After a while | |
55 | > I realised they'd mostly gone, and I tried to track some of the stragglers | |
56 | > down to find out what had happened to the ringleader or any of the kids I'd | |
57 | > gotten to know. | |
58 | ||
59 | > The ringleader had been killed in shellfire, was the answer. I found his blog. | |
60 | > It had been silent for a couple of months. Eventually it fell off the internet | |
61 | > when the account was suspended. | |
62 | ||
63 | > When a year later they all seemed to have gone I made more of an effort to do | |
64 | > some digital anthropology and figure out just what had happened to them in | |
65 | > more depth. I talked to a Lebanese peer who ran some adult Arabic language | |
66 | > discussion spaces and he speculated that by that point hey had all died or | |
67 | > fled and crossed the border into other countries.” | |
68 | ||
69 | As we reflect on the sobering condition of the world around us, it would be | |
70 | easy to forget about the positives. | |
71 | ||
72 | We have the privilege of seeing thousands of people work on thousands of | |
73 | projects they love, and it's humbling and exciting to be allowed to play a small | |
74 | part in each of them. We're extremely grateful for that: we love learning about | |
75 | your projects; we love learning about the different ways in which people | |
76 | communicate and collaborate; we love learning about what you produce and why. | |
77 | ||
78 | We have exceptionally generous sponsors who not only provide us with hardware | |
79 | and bandwidth but also with their continued time and expertise when required. | |
80 | ||
81 | Thanks to one such sponsor we have also secured the majority of the requisite | |
82 | funding to put on a two-day live conference which will take place in the UK in | |
83 | August 2017. Further details and a formal announcement will follow early in the | |
84 | New Year. We are incredibly excited and hope that you will join us; we'd love | |
85 | for your project to exhibit or perhaps you could give a talk? Keep an eye out | |
86 | for our announcement! | |
87 | ||
88 | With that, we would like to thank you all for using freenode and wish you the | |
89 | very best for 2017! |