Wouter Tebbens

Brief description: social enterpreneur for building a free knowledge society

Interests: participation, access to knowledge, transparency, sustainability, inclusion, copyleft, free knowledge, free software, open standards, free hardware, open communities, open access, peer production processes, privacy

Website: http://freeknowledge.eu

About me

I am one of the founders and president for a second term of the Free Knowledge Institute and director of the Free Technology Academy. Over the last ten years I have been working in various roles related to "free knowledge": from 2001 till 2009 running a company offering Free Software based services; between 2006 and 2008 as coordinator of the European Commission's FP6-funded SELF Project (Science, Education & Learning in Freedom) to design a platform for the collaborative construction of educational materials. In between I have been chairing the Free/Libre/Open Source Software working group at the Internet Society Netherlands and organised awareness raising campaigns and seminars about Free Software and Open Standards (in 2005 we made it into Dutch Parliament with the open source petition!)

I am in particular interested in social changes that come along with new technologies. Some core values: participation, access to knowledge, transparency, sustainability and social inclusion. Related to that I think a true knowledge society can only be built on strong foundations including these ones: copyleft, free knowledge, open communities, open access, peer production processes, privacy. We have an increasing body of research that shows the social benefits of free knowledge, peer production and open development, while for its counter parts hardly any independent research can make an accademically sound case.