2007-03-24 23:48
by Vasil KolevI went today to the protest in defence of the freedom in the Internet…
The organization was pretty bad. The event began at 17:00, but until 18:20 they had no electricity, so all kinds of weird things were chanted – “We’re not criminals”, “We’re not pirates” (which sounded like “We’re criminals”, “We’re pirates”), “Zamunda” (I doubt that a lot of people know where the word originates, we wondered if someone would ask for bananas), “Arena”, stuff related to the torrents, and stuff which wasn’t really related, like “Mafia” (the brother was shouting “Rakiya”), “Boyko – fag”, “CSKA”, “Bulgarians – heroes” (I really didn’t find the meaning in those)…
Some of the banners were also really fun – like the one “Bulgarian peering > international peering” (something like “the Bulgarian elephant and the Soviet elephant – trunk to trunk through the centuries”), there was one really fun comic of Javor Kolev doing naughty things (I need to take the photos from Erinin).
After they brought power, the things went pretty well – they read a nice pile of good-written declarations, they played some proper music (well, “Episod”, not that proper, but it was ok) and asked the people not to vote for the current government, who allowed this to happen (which was more addressed for the government, not to the people, we all know how much the young people vote).
(it’s somewhat weird that they weren’t able to find a generator a bit faster to make everything earlier – the people were mostly ISPs, they should have disaster recovery plans and such)
And I think I’ll add to the howto for organizing such events (the one Peio started), there are ways to make this better. There were a lot of journalists, there were also a lot of people (about 1000, at least in the beginning), I met a lot of people who I haven’t met in a few years, we had fun, it wasn’t bad …
I’m looking for recordings, pictures, etc. from the protest to upload them somewhere on marla for better distribution. I’m also thinking about running a tracker to distribute the recordings of the lectures – then it’ll be easier to balance the traffic from a few places, it should be a bit more effective.
Update: Photos from Ioco.
Update: Photos from Erinin.