This workshop explores the convergence of art, community and mobile technology in Vancouver, and in other urban centres of the world. The conversation will respond to the idea of a Fearless City, with a wireless mesh network, open source two-way social media sharing for marginalized residents and artists in one of the industrialized world’s poorest urban centres.

Vancouver and Geneva are often ranked by the UN as the two most liveable cities in the world, yet Vancouver's underbelly exposes a homeless population of 3000 residents and a health and addiction crisis - in the shadow of the 2010 Winter Olympic & Paralympic Games. What can artists, designers and open source developers learn from the world's poorest areas, where mobile technology has had a transformative impact?

The workshop will feature an introduction to Fearless City, followed by small group discussions exploring how open mobile communities are advancing storytelling, cultural expression, social inclusion, and human rights. What tactics, projects, software and gear are combating the digital barrier, such as establishing open source mesh networks, mobile rich media file sharing, live mobile video editing, live screens, redistribution systems for mobile devices, and commissioning mobile art? Help co-design this mobile communication system by contributing your unique solutions of both hardware and software breakthroughs and designs.

Learn about mobile file sharing systems (video, photo, text, voice) transforming human relations for marginalized peoples. What can we learn from proliferators of mobility or similar mobile community generated media projects, as the Grameenphone in Bangladesh, projects that protect sex trade workers in South America, media artists in industrialized cities via www.turbulence.org, a Los Angeles network of labour immigrants using open source mobile phones to make digital community news at www.mobilevoices.net. Through www.zexe.net different misrepresented or underprivileged communities are sharing their views and daily experience using mobile phones; the democratizing power of mobility is profiled on www.shareideas.org, www.mobilevoices.org, and others.

Read on for background on the Vancouver project that is in alpha stage at www.fearlesscity.ca, with an open publishing platform and mobile and open mesh network being developed through 2008.

With an objective of delivering digital inclusion, Fearless City is being launched by a media arts cluster mashing tech companies, social enterprise, cultural and community partners, along with residents, artists, and street-level bloggers. Fearless City technical and community partners are: Fearless Media Cluster, www.creativetechnology.org, Simon Fraser University's Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST), Free Geek Vancouver, FreeTheNet, Gallery Gachet, Downtown Eastside Community Arts Network, Social Signal, Remarkk!, the Vancouver Community Net , the Community Arts Council of Vancouver, and the Vancouver Open Network Initiative. Fearless City is receiving seed funding from New Media BC and Mobile Muse.

This is both a research and production experiment; a sending up of a balloon of possibilities in terms of the power of mobile communications technology in communicating within communities and across communities. People connect, are involved, and interact through this ground-breaking wireless community.

The Fearless City initiative takes on the principles of our emerging media ecology not simply as an elegant assertion of individual identity, of the marking of self within the confines of a digital/virtual life–but as a vehicle for community development, understanding and claim.

The project adapts successful peer-learning and localized solutions to increase capacity and explore identity and economic and social inclusion. Poor, marginalized, homeless, addicted, and/or people with mental health issues will produce media content for live screens in public spaces and be made accessible to any and all.

For artists and bloggers, Fearless City supports the ability to act on the right to information and raises the degree of democratization of society. As civil society is increasingly integrated and sustained by information and communication technologies, the relevance of these agencies and their services is dependent on their being accessed and shaped by individuals. More than PCs, the mobile phone will have a major structural impact in expanding the possibility of electronically communicating to those who are marginalized.

Fearless mobile devices broaden the potential for public participation in discourse within public spaces, and amongst artists and residents denied a voice in the heart of an Olympic city. (see www.vancouver2010.com). Come join this conversation that will take place in both large and small group format.