The three ContactCon Bazaar Awards

[Michel Bauwens]

 Via Douglas rushkoff:

The projects each received $10,000 from Pepsi, deposited as the seed money for free campaigns on IndieGogo. Winners were chosen by a team of judges selected from among the participants.

 

The three winners were:

Fayetteville Free Library Fab Lab

The Fayetteville Free Library aims to be the first library in the United States to build a free, public access Fab Lab. At the foundation of the FFL's Fab Lab will be a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer, central to the greater vision of encouraging local innovation, collaboration and education. Lauren Britton Smedley, who has spearheaded this effort, said “the FFL is excited to provide our community with free and open access to this technology.  We are building a replicable model with the hope that other libraries around the country will be able to follow and learn from our experience.  It was such a thrill to participate at the Contact Conference, it was truly an amazing and inspiring day."


Free Network Foundation

The Free Network Foundation is an organization whose purpose is to steward the creation of a censorship-proof, disruption-resistant, global peer-to-peer network which is fully owned and operated by its participants. They managed to get two prototype FreedomTowers up and running in time for Contact - one at Occupy Austin, the other here at Occupy Wall Street in Liberty Square. The towers are providing Internet access to the occupiers, and will be used to establish an occupation-to-occupation Virtual Private Network. Next steps for the FNF, according to its founder, Isaac Wilder, include continuing to build out their burgeoning Wide Area Network, applying to the American Registry for Internet Numbers for status as an Autonomous System, iterating and improving the design of FreedomTowers, and working with the FreedomBox project to build FreedomNode, a mesh-enabled FreedomBox capable of opportunistically engaging in communications that are materially peer-to-peer.

FreedomBox Foundation

FreedomBox is a personal server running a free software operating system and free applications, designed to create and preserve personal privacy by providing a secure platform upon which federated social networks can be constructed. “Free communities require free communication.  Once we have that, no problem is beyond our ability to cooperate toward a solution,” says FreedomBox’s Executive Director, James Vasile.

 

Runners up included: The Library Farm, New Hive, Meshkit, GiftFlow, Commotion, Tether, and Digital City Mechanics.