please pardon me for disappearing from the web - i have been quite busy in the last days. while the wgig is starting to do some division of labour and small drafting sub-groups are forming around each of the issues, i had to cope with my work, with the alac, and other stuff.

these last days in italy were a sort of "innovation week", to celebrate the release of the italian version of the creative commons license - which, i've just discovered, has been led by a branch of the national research centre headed by the professor i've been working with in 1998 for my graduation thesis (world is so small!).

lots of interesting ideas and news came out of these meetings, so i am going to post them in bits and pieces as soon as i can. in the introductory post to this collection, however, i wanted to talk about yesterday's lunch at the trattoria tagiura in milan (food feedback: absolutely recommended), and about the illustrious people i had near me.

so, on my front left side, i had fiorello cortiana, member of parliament for the green party, organizer of the meeting, and the most active politician in italy on information society issues. icann participants might remember him speaking at the wsis workshop in rome.

on my side of the table, two seats on the left, i had professor stefano rodotŕ, the head of the italian privacy authority. he is absolutely an outstanding person, and i took the chance to have a chat with him about the requirement (published almost two years ago!) posed by the european privacy authorities for privacy protection mechanisms in whois databases. basically, our privacy authorities are absolutely puzzled by the total despise that icann is showing towards their recommendations - so something might happen about this.

just left of me i had professor lawrence lessig, the guest star of the week. it was the first time i met him in person, and i must say that he impressed me a lot, not just as a thinker but also as a person - something that, without any offense, you can't for example say about rms ("stallman is the free software clone of george w. bush" was one of the comments made at the table). even if the basic concepts of information sharing are well known, presentation and speeches by professor lessig are quite thought-provoking. i am starting to wonder whether we should bring him and other thinkers at a wgig meeting.

however, all of this was neglectible, if compared to the pleasure of sitting right in front of a monument of italian music such as mauro pagani. in the 70's he was one of the members of pfm, the only italian prog rock group which ever made it into the international charts; but he's also famous as the author of the music of creuza de mä (1984) by fabrizio de andré. de andré is said to be the best italian poet of the second half of the twentieth century, but this record in particular, all sung in zeneise (the traditional language of genoa), is generally regarded as the european start of the cultural movement later known as "world music".

now, i know i have to stop here, otherwise i might start using half a page to explain you precisely what a creuza is (mä is easier, it being the sea), and another couple to talk about the tight cultural love-hate relationship between turin (the land) and genoa (the sea).

but actually, the point of pagani's presence at the meeting was trying to get one of the most esteemed italian musicians to release some music under a creative commons license. showing that actual well-known professionals can do so would be a huge step forward towards the affirmation of free models.

so, what does it happen when you put all these people at the same table? well, one of the problems that i see in our online activities as civil society people is that we are so sparse and tend not to know each other in person - and we often end up feeling alone.

if we want to get any real long term result, we have to feel ourselves like part of a broader movement, with other people working on nearby fields of activity, and ready to share and support each other when necessary.

and this definitely needs more lunches together.