Seeing that the burocractic ways of the brazilian government where cloged, we found a way of working together with civil society by leaping into the digital era and collaborating directly with different collectives, from artistis, indymedia activists, hackers to musicians, trough discussion lists and wikis in the internet. We created a concept for a government project that is joining many agents in Brasilian culture, aiming to create cultural hotspots troughout the country where local cultural production exists. The cultural hotspots will use free and open source software to produce digital artifacts and will distribute these using alternative intelectual property licenses and broadband connections to the Internet. This talk will portrait over two years of our history getting this project into the government and our current progress implementig the cultural hotspots.

"Brazil's minister of culture, Gilberto Gil has launched a project called Points of Culture (Pontos de Cultura) that will establish free-software studios, built with free software, in a thousand towns and villages throughout Brazil, enabling people to create culture using tools that support free cultural transmission. If things go as planned, the result will be an archive of Brazilian music, which will be stored in digital form and governed by a license inspired by free software's GPL. The Canto Livre project will "free music" made in Brazil, for Brazilians (and the world) to remix and re-create. And like a free-software project, it achieves that freedom on the back of copyright"?

We have a big interest in expose our projects specially in search of synergy around the world. Our project is both governmental and non governmental at the same time. It is unique in the sense that it empowers activist movements in an anarchical process of building "isles" of free knowledge...I believe that it is exactly to the point of what the hack is going on in brazil...