Le Web3 Live

No sooner LeWeb3 is over that critics point out that each edition of Loïc Le Meur’s conference persists to avoid the “other Web” such as open sources softwares, webartists, hackers and gamers. Well that’s true in a way, if one consider the appearance of Mozilla Europe social entrepreneur* Tristan Nitot or VoW “shogun” Joi Ito as exceptions. That lays also in the fact that LeWeb3 has no pretention of covering the entire Web landscape, but only its business side.

“There’s no Web 1,2 or 3.0. There’s a useful, open, generous and creative Web on the one side, and a venal, manipulating and police-related on the other side”, simplifies André Lozano, a French webartist better known as “Loz“. “We should stop rediscovering the Web each time we build a business model on one of its aspects that already exists for ages”. Lozano takes as an example the current trend of social networks and recalls that “participation and community have been the basics of the Web since the beginning”. Only the amount of people and contents on it has skyrocketted in the last few years.

Alexandre Brachet, founder of a small French webdesign company called Upian, agrees on Lozano’s opinion. “Without the other Web, start-ups wouldn’t exist”. Brachet believes creativity and business are two separate worlds. “When financial interests set in, wasted services and advertisers always arise”.

Brachet didn’t attend LeWeb3: “I just don’t care about it”. Nevertheless, he went to the Netvibes party at La Scala on tuesday night, as Tariq Krim is a friend of him and also because “networking is important”. Mozilla Europe CEO Tristan Nitot resumes LeWeb3 on his blog: “We didn’t talk about open sources at all, at least from what I’ve heard and read on the program. But to be earnest, the great majority of the websites we discussed about are working with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) platforms”. Nitot reckons however to have enjoyed “talking about the Web’s future, meeting people with common interests and eating at lot of chocolate cakes”!

Even more radical, hackers could be seen as the exact opposite of what LeWeb3 stands for. Anonymity and a non-commercial use of the Web are their obsession. In september 2006 for instance, the group of Web security experts and human rights activists Hacktivismo developed Torpark, a free software that helps avoiding traffic analysis that “threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, state security”. “We live in a time where technologies are cherry picking and collating every aspect of our online lives”, wrote Hacktivismo Canadian founder Oxblood Ruffin. We guess Ruffin didn’t attend LeWeb3. Or was he there incognito?

* A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas business entrepreneurs typically measure performance in profit and return, social entrepreneurs assess their success in terms of the impact they have on society. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors.