Past and future of the WikiPlaza, with Giuseppe Silvi aka bitwatt
During the last days we have had the opportunity to discuss the WikiPlaza with Giuseppe Silvi, a pioneer of public connected spaces, the inventor of the Piazza Telematiche (1990).
Giuseppe, also known as bitwatt, has been working on several embodiments of his idea, and actually built the first one for the Soccer World Cup Italy 1990.
Giuseppe is very enthusiastic about the Wikiplaza, and sees very clearly, that while his ideas focused in the early days of the Internet in connectivity and infrastructure, the actual stress of WikiPlaza is on the social interaction and cooperation; communication and open source. He describes it as the shift from Internet 1.0 y Internet 2.0, - and probably beyond. As mentioned somewhere else, we are carefully reading lately the GGG proposal of Berners_Lee - that we understand as an answer to O'Reilly's proposal for web 3.0.
One of the most interesting suggestion of bitwatt, is to build a WikiPlaza, in L´ Aquila, the Italian city recently destroyed by an earthqueake, as a space to rebuild social interaction and catalyze the reconstruction efforts of the devastated region.
We just shot a video interview with bitwatt, that hopefully will be soon edited and published in the WikiPlaza mediabase.
Some links to Giuseppe Silvi's work:
http://lacantine.org/users/bitwatt
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piazza_telematica
