Translation: Bridget King/Martin Perazzo
 

Good morning. It is really wonderful still to see so many smiling faces at
this stage . For me, it's the best evidence I could have of what the spirit
of this Congress has been. I have been inundated by messages from all of
you telling me what a great time you were having. There was a moment in
which I wasn't sure what it was we were up to, I'd thought we were here to
debate the conclusions of Maig'98 but so much happiness was starting to
take on almost erotic tones. It is clear then that the Congress has created
a general feeling of satisfaction. Over the past few days, I have heard
some truly surprising statements, both because of the passion with which
they were expressed and because of what was being said. From amongst so
many, I have chosen two. The first is the last line of the speech Bernard
Smith made during the inauguration. Referring to Maig'98 he said, "I think
we must investigate why all of this is happening in Barcelona. Why not in
Helsinki where there is the highest proportion of internauts in the world,
or California?" He didn't choose these two places at random. He mentioned
Helsinki, Finland, the country which is always top of the list when it
comes to the number of people with access to the Internet in relation to
total population. And, in the second place, California, guys, the Golden
Dream, cyberspace's Big Frontier. I am not going to answer Smith's
question, because as he put it, this needs to be investigated.

The second statement came from Alejandro Piscitelli while we were having
supper at the Olympic Port last night. "I have been to dozens, hundreds of
congresses, but this is the first time in a long time that I didn't get
bored, that I was interested in what was being said. I really liked the way
content was organised and proof of this is that I have the feeling that
this is all coming to an end far too soon." This is a feeling we have all
shared, we have all complained that the sessions were too short.
Fortunately, however, the sessions are not over. The majority of the
participants have expressed the desire for them to continue, all we have to
do now is decide how.

I think that the success of Maig'98 lies, amongst other things, in the
simple fact that this has been the first "Congress of Conclusions" of this
kind to be held in the world. And, I think we must give this the merit that
it is due, and boast and speak out about it as loudly as possible. Never
before has there been a Congress like this, with an online phase which
established the rules of the game for the debate that followed in the real,
face-to-face, phase. And, the reason has been that up to now, amongst other
things, people who have organised congresses in the Internet, and I'm going
to say this out loud and clear too, have never believed that the Internet
could do the things that the Net is doing now. That's why, when congresses
are organised in the Internet they tend to be exact replicas of congresses
in the real world with the name online tagged on just because e-mail is
used for the announcement, call for papers and so on.

We believed in another way of doing things. We thought that it was time
that what we have been saying all the time in the Internet was put into
practice. We decided that it was time to see if it was true that, beyond
its purely academic value, cyberspace really has flows of communication,
interactivity, interaction and integration... And, in order to do so, we
had to be basically very audacious, because we didn't have very much to go
on. This reminds me of something which has come to mind often during this
Congress. In 1962, the Football World Cup was held in Chile. Carlos
Dittborn, the head of the organising committee's slogan was, "Because we
have nothing, we will do everything". I have always been impressed by the
spirit of that statement which impregnated everyone who made that event
possible. And a similar spirit has kept us going over the last months.

We haven't just argued about the circularity of ideas in the Internet, we
have put them into circulation. We haven't only argued about the
hypertextuality of knowledge, we have put it into action. And we did so
without the necessary technological means when we started off. But now we
are the only people on the planet with the necessary experience and
knowledge to develop these technologies and apply them to "online
congresses of conclusions". And this knowledge and experience is summed up
by your presence and participation here. We have established a new way of
relating to one another, of discussing things via the Internet and giving
expression to this phase in ideas, debates and projects, in a word,
continuity, when we get to the "real" stage. There's much more to this than
meets the eye because it implies a particular way of understanding the
Internet and its users. And it worked!

The online phase, as you know, took place from November 1997 to April
1998.When we reached this date hardly anyone had signed up for the Congress
which, logically enough, made the Organising Committee and others involved
in Maig'98, very nervous. I said, "Don't worry, more than 400 hundred
people will turn up". Obviously enough, they looked at me like the
perennial madman they think I am. But I had the proof in hand. The
coordinators of the seminars and workshops, in turn, said things like,
"Listen, whatisname is saying that the workshop isn't working out, nobody
is saying anything". And I asked, "Has whatisname contributed or sent
anything in?", "No, no", came the reply, "He/she sent the message to me".
And I thought to myself: this is the law of the Internet, one person speaks
and a hundred just take a look. The question was, were there really a
hundred looking in? The last count I made with the coordinators gave us
more than 300 participants between November and April, people who had shown
themselves and said something. The figures were tallying. As far as I was
concerned, the Congress had already worked. Because in the Internet one
does not participate just by talking but by creating exlicit and implicit
information flows. And if you play with these and stimulate them, you get
results. And in the end, as I said, the results are here, there have been
400 participants and to a certain extent what has happened is a calculated
result, not a chance one. Over the last 6 or 7 months we have maintained a
level of debate which has been uneven, unbalanced and arduous. It has been
extremely difficult to find out how to do things because the mechanisms are
not that obvious. Everybody tugged in different directions before we were
able to structure the discussion. But, we held fast to the idea of an
online congress: determined to get to the end of that stage with enough
material in hand in order to extract conclusions for the "real" phase. Now
what we have been left with is a very rich experience and a certain
methodology, the real possiblity of turning this resource into
technological applications which will allow us to clearly define the
content of all the phases of a congress of these characteristics. We even
advanced along these lines when we incorporated the "multicasting" system
provided by Narcís Vives in the Education workshop, thanks to which one
message reaches the e-mail boxes of subscribers to a list, the designated
web page and the newsgroup, classifies itself and can be searched for by a
search engine. In other words, we are already starting to develop specific
mechanisms for organising online debates into practice.

What were the results of all this effort? That very high standards had
already been set by the time we got to the face-to-face sessions. We hadn't
come here to tell each other about little battles we'd had, although the
temptation always existed and some people maybe gave in to it. We came to
discuss an accumulated body of knowledge. We didn't need to think about our
point of departure because we already knew what it was, but just where we
were going: and this is the territory of projects and teamwork. Standards
were very high and that was especially noticeable in the quality of the
contributions both by workshop and seminar coordinators and among the
participants. We had so much to say that no amount of time would have
satisfied our appetite for participation.

So, after this audacious exercise which proved that what we had been saying
for so long about the Internet really made sense, we are now faced with a
series of questions. On the one hand, the Grup de Periodistes Digitals
(GPD) *, which has been the "alma mater" of the Congress, will have to make
up its mind about what it is going to do in the future. This is connected,
of course, to what is going to happen to our work from now on. I don't know
if you are aware of the fact that a vote was held in the GPD's list to
decide if it would become an association, the interlocutor for all that the
Congress brought and will bring about. Now we will have to decide if we
want to do this or not and under what conditions. Some of the projects set
out here cannot go ahead with just an electronic distribution list as
backup.

Another conclusion is that the Congress was held in Barcelona, in
Catalonia, and when I say that we have hosted the world's first online
Congress of this kind, I mean that we have placed Catalonia on the map, so
to speak, and, in addition, on a map which will be fundamental in the
future. I think we should put this in its proper perspective, trying not to
lose sight of the wood for the trees. We have done far more for Catalonia
than other people who tried to distract from what the central goals of this
Congress should have been.

There are three more things, though, all of them important. First of all,
we have discussed the issue of electronic publications and have, in
addition, turned the Congress itself into an enormous electronic
publication. Many of the issues we have discussed over these three days had
already been resolved within the mechanics of the Congress itself and, as
so often occurs, we weren't even capable of transferring them to the
discussions in the halls, because the issues were so new, so innovative,
that our discussions were frequently based on old parameters without taking
the innovations we had generated sufficiently into account. We must
re-examine all that we have done in the Congress from a critical
perspective. So, I invite you all to leaf through the book of presentations
which we have distributed before you go to sleep every night- there's a lot
to learn from it.

A second very important point deals with the the future of the Internet and
the role of local government - and I would like to stress this given the
illustrious guests accompanying me. Beyond the discussion as to whether
democracy should be participative or representative, or any other gibberish
we are being fed about how cyberspace can affect political systems, this
Congress set in motion a form of participative democracy that actually
worked. We still don't know how to crystallise and formalise it, but we
managed it. We have had more than our fill of projects in participative
democracy in every nook and cranny of the Internet, in which the people who
should be the subjects of such projects have no say whatsoever. Well, in
Maig'98 we uncovered the ends and the means, we participated, and we also
reached conclusions. And moreover, our bodies, as the police officer told
us yesterday, are begging for more --we want to continue what we started.
And we want to continue in this innovative manner. We do not want to
continue just listening - we want to have the chance to receive, transmit,
integrate, propose and reach new destinations where the presence of each
and every one of us can be felt. We will have to propose a set of minimum
guidelines to make sure that this will continue to work and to explore new
ways of participating.

 Finally, the Congress has been quite successful in creating an audience,
something we hardly discussed in the sessions. Like the other coordinators,
I have maintained a list related to the participants in the newsgroup,
along with the GPD's list and the Congress website. In addition, these
"ad-hoc" lists were linked to the lists set up by some of the participants.
The end result was the creation of information and knowledge exchanges in a
far broader and richer context than that which was strictly determined by
the Congress. Such information flows are one of the great lessons of this
Maig'98, which should be the object of further research for future
encounters.

The Congress concludes by proposing two major projects, which I hope will
be to everyone's benefit. The first is the creation of the International
Directory of Electronic Publications (DIPE, http://www.gpd.org), which has
yet to be endowed with a security system in order to provide enough
guarantees to make it safe for general use. Be that as it may, I invite you
to participate in testing and making suggestions us  to how to go about
developing it. The directory will give us a colourful idea of the
electronic publication scenario, beyond traditional online media.

The second project is the creation of an open European and Latin-American
centre for digital communication or electronic publication, which will be
based in Barcelona. The GPD can advance this idea to a certain extent, but
it is the task of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia,  Barcelona's City
Council, universities and companies to take over this project and turn our
city into a reference point integrated in a European network of similar
centres and open to active cooperation with Latin America. We believe that
a step like this would give us an active, decisive and definitive presence
in the design and development of the Information Society. The centre would
have three basic areas of activity: training, research and breeding gound
for new corporate ventures.

I believe that the latter is an essential problem which requires a great
deal of attention. I still think that discussions like the one we held
yesterday about business and online publishing are entirely insufficient.
Economists have destroyed the world so much that they are now poised to do
the same with the Internet. They are addressing the wrong issues and
questions. It made no sense at all that discussions revolved around who
makes money in a room where over 100 persons, all actively participating in
the Internet, were gathered. This type of question is typical of a
particular world view. The major question right now is: what are you as a
business person learning from managing information and knowledge through
the Internet? The problem is the social potential of what we are doing and
not its economic virtuality, because this is exactly what is being
generated by a world which we are attempting to change by introducing new
and different ways of working and interrelating on the Web. The social
potential is phenomenal, and should be nurtured fearlessly and explicitly.
Even though I may not be earning anything at present, when I log on and
begin to work, I have to learn how to find information, manage it, re-work
it, package it and distribute it. That is to say, I have to find the raw
materials, process them in an assembly line designed by myself, obtain an
end-product, open the doors of my info-factory, and send it out onto the
market. I am doing this right now, and so far I have not made any money out
of it. And I have never done this before. For the first time I am operating
as an entrepeneur dealing in information and knowledge. At the same time,
I'm still a wage-earner elsewhere. I am combining both "trades". And I'm
not the only one - all of you are doing the same. And if an economist comes
by and asks me who is making money online, my answer is "What's it to
you?". That's the wrong question. The right one, from my standpoint, is:
"What are we going to do to make this social potential come to life in the
crucial sector of an emerging economy based on information and
communications?" "What are our political, financial, administrative and
educational powers doing about it?" Answering this question provides
fertile ground for discussion. And we will probably pay greater attention
to this questions in the next Congress.

And this is one of the questions which a centre like the one we are
proposing must respond to. Because we are not creating a centre where only
big media groups will be able come to learn about how to function in the
Information Society; our primary targets are the thousands of small
companies which are at work creating the Internet today. And I'm giving
fair warning - the problem is very serious, because these companies, which
have never been taken into account as players in the society in which they
act, are there in their thousands. Society --from local to supranational
administrations-- is not ready to talk to us. Everything is perfectly
channelled so that only those who move tremendous resources, big names from
industry and finance, have a voice. It's going to be terribly tough to turn
things around. It's going to require a massive effort, and I believe that
the centre which we are proposing will be able to provide the required
boost in Europe and Latin America, at least in terms of training, research
and company creation.

As we have shown over the past few days, we are very interested in and
concerned with research. We are in a new, dynamic, boisterous and
gound-breaking field. This has been obvious in many of our debates. If I
were a researcher, the first thing I would do would be to congratulate
myself on having proposed a work programme for the next 50 years, given the
number of issues addressed. For starters, of course, I would tackle the
still-vague concept of the "digital journalist". The only thing we really
know about it thus far is that we are referring to something whose spinal
cord, skeleton and other identifying features are being left by the
wayside. After a mere 200 years of existence, the journalist spawned by the
Industrial Revolution's communications model seems to find itself between a
rock and a hard bit. We have generated a wealth of arguments about the
content and operation of electronic media. Clearly, the idea of electronic
publishing still has too many connotations which are left overs from the
"ancien regime". It would be necessary to spread our wings and fly to
imagine what the new media will be like from a different representation of
knowledge. The debate in this morning's workshop [hypocentres of
hyperlanguage] has shown us the gap which still exists between hypertext
and the circular representation of knowledge.

Well, I could say a million things more, but I'm going to close with a
couple of practical issues. One is that we will logically respond to your
request that this Congress should have some form of continuity. We still
don't have any clear ideas about how we're going to do this, but you will
be receiving proposals about it. We are thinking about creating platforms
for discussion on fixed dates, moderated by a group of experts at first,
and open thereafter to all participants to reach conclusions that can
translate into projects and knowledge which will enable us to work better
in the context of the Information Society. We will have to come up with
some form of technological device that will allow us to do this.
Fortunately, this Congress has had its own "Wizard of Oz", Carlos Gascón
,who with the generous help of Pangea and Frankie (from the
Telecommunications Engineering College-UPC), has managed to solve problems
that many of us laypeople would never even have begun  to formulate.

It looks like this Congress will have sequels, because, as usual, when
people have fun, an economist pops up and says, "Hey! There's money to be
made here!" Somehow, there is market value to be found in the fun and
enjoyment of these past three days. It's no wonder that fun and
entertainment make up one of the wealthiest, most powerful sectors of the
world economy, and not only on the Internet. Perhaps that's why we have
already received a number of concrete offers for the next Congress, and it
has even been suggested that it should be a "roving" Congress, with the
next one to be held in Madrid. We'll have to make a decision about that too.

I am going to conclude by thanking those responsible for what you have all
been telling me from the very first day --the excelent organisation of the
Congress. Like true Spaniards, we are all consummate sceptics. Our first
reaction when something runs as smoothly as silk is to say, "This is
fishyt... this can't happen here, this is too well-organised. I come here,
I get a warm wellcome, I tell them my name and is on the list, I'm given a
dossier and shown in, and there's actually something going on, everything
seems to be in order with simultaneous translation in 3 languages..." Well,
I'm not going to go on listing everything that went right, it's just that
it's all too much for us. We don't expect things to go right... we expect a
bit of disorder, confusion and turmoil. We come from the Internet culture,
we're experts at managing chaos, not at living in organised structures
--this has caused minor personal traumas and major culture shock. Everyone
has felt the need to come to us and say, "Wow, this is really
well-organised... fantastic!" It's taken us a little while to change our
mentality and  make comments like "I met so-and-so, what a fascinating
person".

The people behind this surprising are from Grup Serveis. They spent months
on a razor's edge because financially figures simply didn't tally, and
decisions had to be made constantly about the debt we were running up and
what resources we could use. And the, in the second place,  nobody had
signed up for the Congress until only a few days ago. Let's face it - as
Congress-goers, we're not exactly the quintessence of organisation, and we
tend to leave everything to the very last minute. Nevertheless, Grup
Serveis performed the miracle of turning everything it touched into pure
silk.

Carme Peiró in coordination and Anna Solana and Silvia Llombart in the
Secretariat of the Organisation form the solid core of the event. I can't
imagine having done anything without them. Carme Peiró played a key role in
keeping the organising group's spirits high. And so it went on with the
coordinators of the seminars and workshops, who kept the Congress' online
machinery going and made it possible to attain the high standards of the
'live' sessions. Over the past months, I have always had the impression
that David de Montserrat, 'David Nono' to us, was living inside the Web. No
matter what time of day or night I sendt him a paper, I always received a
'posted' confirmation a minute later. It crossed my mind more than once
that his e-mail was equipped with an answering machine... but no, the
speech or paper had indeed been posted on the Web.

Throughout these days, many new people have worked to make the Congress
transmit this feeling of a living, healthy organism. Lavinia TV broadcast
all the sessions via RealVideo and RealAudio. We know that hundreds of
people throughout Spain, Latin America and the U.S. followed the Congress
over the Web at one time or another. Boton Cybercomunicaciones broadcast
the educational workshop via video conference. The UPC staff, in particular
its technicians, did their utmost for us, as though the Congress were their
own. Journalists from the Association of Women Journalists of Catalonia
(ADPC) and journalism students have worked in all the seminars and
workshops to draft the conclusions and glean first impressions from the
coordinators. All this will be posted on the Web shortly.

The Col.legi de Periodistes de Catalunya (the Catalan Journalist
Association) backed us from the beginning, something very important for us
to be able to act in the real world, where electronic lists like the GPD's
are neither highly thought of, nor frowned upon... they are simply not seen
at all. The Col.legi's support was crucial in reaching our goals. The UPC
didn't hesitate one second to place its facilities at our disposal,
something which clearly shows its innovative spirit. This formal marriage
between engineering and communication is quite remarkable, even though the
Internet is a product of both fields. We hope that this teamwork will
continue into the future and that it can continue to bear such special
fruit as Maig'98.
Thanks to the European Commission we have been able to publish the
proceedings of the Congress.

Finally, a word of thanks to our sponsors, without whose help our debts
would have been so immense that the next Congress would have had to be
organised in the Seychelles, where we would all have taken refuge.

Our heartfelt thanks go out to each and every one of you. Without your
participation, we would never have enjoyed these three days so much, and we
would have missed out on an experience which will doubtless remain forever
in our hearts.
Salut!

Luis angel Fernandez Hermana
Director of Maig'98
17 May 1998