I am at BarCamp this weekend, flew here straight from Aktau and it feels so good to be surrounded by a huge number of geeks! Here they are, dragging around laptops, wires and charges, video cameras and AV equipment and it's really familiar and refreshing. BarCamp this year is tending toward more commercial, with a lot of new projects presenting their wearz, and lots of glitter from sponsors. There was little actual talk of policy, politics and issues was rare and mainly showed up in intimate little circles around the tables in the break room.
Finally, on the second day the Soros foundation sponsored a panel where they invited a government and a civic representative of the organizations responsible or somehow positioned in charge of controlling and developing kaznet. The politics is boiling underneath and it came out immediately boiling and unordered... There are a lot of opinions and a lot of arguing and the conversation immediately reminded me the kind of non-conversation that shows up whenever things like DRM is discussed in the US... The main thing is - regulating the Internet is very very difficult and basically impossible and it is all about politics and political leanings and ideas. The tempers run high but the majority of the audience is bored... the girl next to me is playing sudoku on her phone.
There is a lot of criticism, but there is little concrete suggestion, there are many fairly myopic statements and the professional commentators point out the issues with the commentary. They talk about the reality of central asia where users are powerless and regulating is a hard question. The most disconcerting thing about this panel is that it is very short (only an hour) and includes five very smart people from all over FSU, but only two are giving presentations and accepting questions from the audience. It was a space to vent and people vented but as the only time to vent it was not very constructive.
In general, however, barcamp was a lot of fun despite my general allergy to all easy net-based money-making schemes and pronouncements on the account of the brilliant future of the Internet. The energy of IT guys was really infectious and the fact that some people managed to smuggle kyrgyz bloggers across the very much closed border to participate was impressive. There were bloggers and IT developers from Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia, Armenia and of course Kazakhstan. These appear to be the most active countries on the Internet from the FSU space if you don't count the baltic region (who have a wholly different relationship to the FSU in general). What was curious was that there weren't many actual IT developers and many bloggers freely admitted they had very little IT knowledge. There was little overt and official political discussion, but politics was everywhere, in the very presence of the Kyrgyz, in the occasional snippets of personal conversations around various tables, in the very groupings of people (who they sat with and who they talked with). There was little discussion of social impact and even less discussion of the political potential of the Internet, but the subtext was obvious...
Overall, there was an impressive amount of energy and the startups were interesting because many were not only about advertisement money but also developed as real attempts to change the physical environment through new media and to do it both on the level of the government and on the level of the average user, interested in where they live. These people really cared not only about developing great successful resources that might make them money, but in some cases the kinds of resources that actually might change their world.
There were other interesting moments, however. At some point, one of the biggest Kazakh bloggers who had won a bunch of awards for his blog, pointed something really important out to me. The kazakh language bloggers were not mixing with everyone else. They talked to the Kyrgyz a bit and to the Uzbeks but generally they were hanging out by themselves. He pointed out one particular ethnically Kazakh blogger who blogged in both languages (kazakh and russian) but because he was hanging out a lot with the russians, the kazakh tended to shun him and to ignore his posts. 'You just can't win and this is really dangerous', my guide told me and fretted, 'it's just starting and it is already really evident and we just can't afford this kind of splitting, we won't be able to accomplish anything then!' For their part, the Russian language bloggers simply dismissed these worries, although occasionally acknowledging the presence and the influence of the kazakh language bloggers. I heard a lot of straight out racist - 'the kazakh are just lazy and besides they don't have a diaspora, who do they need to talk to' kinds of statements even from people who are deeply aware of the politics and generally tend to be very much of a liberal bend. It was startling and at the same time kind of expected - these ethnic tensions have been in place here (and everywhere else in FSU) for eons, there is no reason for them to change and there is every reason for them to become glaringly obvious as they get reflected on the Internet.
After Barcamp was over, I kept running into various participants all over town. Almaty is a small city and the wireless hotspots are well known it appears.
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