Thank you. We're here to tell a very sad story, a very outrageous story, but it's also a story of love.

It's the love of Basil Cardable, free internet activist for the free culture and the love of the free culture community for Basil. Basil was a free internet activist and he has been detained in Damascus in 2012.

And his name has been deleted from the prison's register in 2015 and since then there is no information about his current status or whereabouts. So what we want to talk about today is his love for free culture. And I think today there's a lot of spaces where people talk about the value of free culture, of open source, of open science, etc.

And we are also committed to this cause, so we take this as a given. But today we also want to call awareness to the cost that living and loving free culture may bring to some of us. So really the focus of the Free Basil campaign that we want to talk about today is to bring the attention of the people to the Free Basil hashtag,

the freebasil.org website where you can check out news. It's constantly updated of the status of Basil and the campaign. And especially the campaign letter. We would be honored if you add your name to the campaign to Free Basil.

Melanie is a researcher at the CNRS Institute in Paris and she's also a founding member of Creative Commons in France. And she will talk a little bit more about the Free Basil movement that she's been part of for many years. I haven't had the chance to meet Basil but I know a lot of people who did.

And I facilitated a book sprint with a lot of people from the Free Basil movement and the free culture community. Right after the news got out that Basil disappeared from prison. And so the campaign came together and one of the many activities that they did

was a book sprint that talked about the cost of living and loving free culture. So I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. So the book on the right is the one that we did when he disappeared from prison. But Basil himself participated in a book sprint in 2011 which was initiated here by

Transmediale and by book sprints founder Adam Hyde for an open web, which is this one. And there's a nice quote about his contribution to that book back from 2011.

Adam Hyde wrote, most of us were confused by the proliferation of the term open web since any discourse of the net has abused both terms over the last decade. None of us really knew what open was anymore or what it meant these days by the web. What then was the open web? Basil Safadi, contributing remotely from Syria, gave us a clue.

He outlined a stack of conditions that would lead him to agree to web service being identified as open. Then the conversation turned to mapping the idea onto a book structure. So this was in 2011 and then when the terrible news got out that Basil disappeared from prison, many

of his friends and free culture activists came together for another book sprint to speak of the cost of freedom. That we will look at a little bit later. But first, just to quickly show you, this is Basil. We want to show you a really quick video, one minute, introducing Basil and then Melanie

is going to talk about his contribution to the free culture movement and the Free Basil Campaign. Let's see how this works. My name is John Phillips and I'm Basil Cardabile's best friend.

Immediately when I met him, in his nice soft spoken Syrian classical Arabic accent, I knew that he was a gentle free soul.

Basil Cardabile.

I'm going to talk to you a little bit more about the different movements of free culture in which Basil has been involved for many years.

So the purpose of this part of the presentation is to highlight the fact that the campaign

in favor of his liberation and raising awareness about his work is as multimedia as his engagements are.

So, for instance, he's been part of the Creative Commons community that has been mentioned. He founded a hacker lab in Damascus. He was also instrumental in doing 3D reproduction of Palmyra City many years ago.

And the work has been picked up by other developers, other artists concerned with preservation of heritage.

Wikipedia, font library, fabricators, Mozilla, so many movements. So the first Free Basil Day took place on March 15, 2013.

It was organized by friends of Basil and mostly John Phillips, who you saw in the movie, has been very active. So that was the start of an international campaign with many events happening in many cities.

At the same time, people would just gather and organize something. So, for instance, in Paris we organized a meeting in a Syrian restaurant and we

came with a newspaper because we had an op-ed published about free culture and Basil. Other examples of parts of this campaign in different media.

A cookbook, so you can download it and you can cook a dish. So, of course, everything is under an open license or in the public domain. His friends have been putting posters on the street, so that one is in Amsterdam.

So a lot of graphical work, also collaborative translations of articles. Two journalists have been commissioned to lead an investigation about Basil in Syria and in Palestine.

One, Stephanie Vidal, wrote the article in French and then members of the various communities have been translating the article in many different languages.

Also, in The Guardian you can find an interesting article. Another example is, so that was last year, in March, a picnic.

So every year the movement organized specific events. What else? A logo, a design competition.

And recently there has even been a paper co-authored by Hong Wong who did her PhD with a friend of Basil. So she studied with her co-author the campaign and the organization on Twitter with the hashtag FreeBasil.

Which, after Basil disappeared from prison, was seconded by another hashtag, Where is Basil?

And last but not least, the book sprint is another example of collaboration among Basil's friends and friends of friends. So this happened just a few weeks after the news got out that he disappeared from prison.

And 44 contributors came together to contribute to this book. 12 people were actually in the book sprint in France during five days writing, editing, compiling the book. And many, many people participated remotely by contributing paintings, poems, theoretical treatises, polemical pieces and very personal reflections.

All of them very committed to the free culture movement but also taking a critical look at what have been their personal costs and what have been the costs of the movement. In a very humble way because of course most of the people who contributed did so in freedom.

They didn't have to pay a price as high as Basil did. But they still looked at problems as loneliness, burnout, exploitation and also the fact that they were missing friends who had been disappeared because of their participation in the movement.

So we want to read a few quotes from the book to you but we would also like to know what your perspective is. What have been your experiences? What are the reasons that you love free culture, open source, open science, open education, etc. And what costs have you seen or personally experienced?

So what we would like to do by the end of the session is having a wall for the Free Basil campaign and take some nice photos. We would like to ask you to write down one word or sentence about what you love about free culture

and then another post it with something that maybe a cost that you experienced or something that you've seen happening. So maybe you can just pass these around. So one thing you love about free culture and one thing that a cost of participating or living free culture that you've experienced.

Can I just give this to you and you can pass them on? And then maybe we can base them all on a wall and then we'll take a photo and it will feed the website of the campaign.

I highlighted specific events but of course there are more things happening on a very regular basis. So just take a minute to write it down and then maybe once you leave the room you can paste it on the wall so we don't have to get up, all of us now. And we'll also read a few, don't worry it's not going to be a long boring reading, we'll just

read a few short quotes of what some of the contributors in the book wrote about their personal experiences. Melanie also contributed a chapter to the book so we'll start with one of her quotes. So I didn't suffer any costs by participating to the free culture movement so

writing a short piece for this book was an opportunity to reflect on my privilege. And in the contrary, contributing to this movement brought me very close friends and colleagues and a partner.

And I really had to think hard about which social cost and it was just that at some meeting I would have lunch alone discussing copyrights.

That was the only cost but my only social cost has been exclusion by conservative people from whom I needed neither approval nor friendship. Another contributor, Mouchon Serawieff wrote, freedom of information, much like freedom of markets,

doesn't naturally lead to the kind of freedom we hope for in society. In fact, in the past decade since the rise of the free culture movement we've seen many costs such as time, attention and education shifting to the side of the content creators.

While financial profit is centralized by the data hoarding internet giants that enjoy the reputation of information liberators. So he goes on to say, Google for example is considered a great patron of free culture whereas in practice it cannibalizes the free culture that it monetizes,

offsetting the costs of culture from those consuming it and profiting them from those creating it and that is us. Shauna Gordon McKeon writes, we live in alarming times. Even the computers with which

we create these digital gifts are made too often by people trapped in abusive conditions, using processes that light our primary, our primal commons, the global environment. We must advocate for the commons in all of its forms, digital, social, economic, environmental before the cost of freedom becomes too high to bear.

Then we have a short quote from John Wilbanks who writes, there is also a cost within the movement, one we don't talk about much.

When we do actually all get together and for once we're not transgressing against the rest of the people in the room, the ones who don't want to sit with you to talk about copyright at lunch, we have a nasty habit of judging each other, fighting each other over details that the rest of the world doesn't even recognize.

Ginger Kuhn, in all of the free cultural work I've done over the last six years, one of my most pervasive anxieties has been the feeling that I work in public, that everyone is always looking over my shoulder or could be if they wanted to.

It's a difficult feeling to come to terms with, even if it's based on one of the most potent and valuable principles of free culture, transparency. And the next quote is from Lorna Campbell who's been working in open education and she says,

I am not by nature a very open person. My inclination is always to remain closed. I have had to learn openness and I'm not sure I'm very good at it. It's a continual learning experience. When we step or are pushed outside our boundaries and institutions, it's easy to feel disoriented and insecure.

I did not feel free when I had to publish my first book with the commercial press. Few people can actually read the book now because it's so expensive. I signed away the copyright at the price for the job. In an ideal world, I would have published this openly. Martine Paul Eve.

And now we're coming to the last quote before we want to hear from you. A quote by Adam Heidt who says, I find myself, after all this time immersed in free culture, amazed at my holding on to some form of the proprietary way of thinking.

There is no purity on the path to freedom. Walking through the shameful path of not meeting the high bar we've set ourselves to avoid proprietary life, I keep learning about how deeply embedded it is in our daily lives. I keep examining it and it keeps surprising me.

I keep discarding it. There's still a long way to go. So does any of you want to share some of the thoughts that you wrote down? Or maybe you didn't write down?

Or should we give you a little minute of break? Do we have time before the next session? Let me know what time it is. 15. Anyone else want to share?

Or maybe we just post the things together? Yes, somebody's starting already. That's great. And then that would be also nice. Yeah, of course. Before you leave, just leave them on the wall and we can take a picture of that.

So just to wrap it up, you can download the book for free at costoffreedom.cc. You can sign the petition if you want to help the campaign. There are two petitions, one on change.org and one at freebasel.org. And there's also another book that we want to point your attention to by Basel's wife, Nora.

It's a collection of poems that you wrote to him while he was in prison. And you can buy it at waitingforbasel.cc. So all of this would help the campaign and of course the post-its on the wall would also be great. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.