Ubuntu: choir CD release
p2pnet.net news:- Friday evening I attended the CD release of Ubuntu from the World Voices Choir from Brookfield High School. While I was there as I had heard them before, and because my wife teaches at Brookfield, the choice of the name made the evening extra special.
The word Ubuntu is documented on Wikipedia as being both a humanist ideology from Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a computer operating system based on Linux created by a company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. I am someone who always walks around with copies of the Ubuntu operating system to hand to and speak about the philosophy behind Free Software to anyone who cares to listen.
The term can be translated in many ways, including “I am what I am because of what we all are”. This is a philosophy that I have believed for as long as I can remember, and is one of the reasons I became a strong supporter of Free Software (back in 1992) and the growing “commons-based peer production” method of developing and sharing knowledge. As I have written elsewhere on this BLOG, I believe that moving to community-based development and royalty-free distribution of knowledge will be key to solving many of the worlds current problems, ranging from literacy where knowledge sharing is obvious to poverty, hunger and peace where the interconnections are unfortunately less obvious.
The energy of the students in the choir was amazing, and their enjoyment of the music was infectious. The concert ended with the audience being asked to (err.. given permission to?) stand up and join in. Even when the concert was officially ended the students kept going drumming and singing, making you imagine what the halls of the school must be like when these students are around.
During the concert a superintendent acting as emcee spoke while the choirs were setting up between songs. He spoke about how this group may be too young to know how important it is to see such a diverse group of people whose ancestry come from all across the globe all singing together. While the songs were primarily from Africa, the students were very clearly from all across the globe.
I think these students will know that the problems that separate some people from each other are not going away. Watching the news about ongoing wars and our extreme slowness to take up action on climate change makes it clear that we haven’t as a global society embraced Ubuntu. These students give hope that we are making progress. They will Move our World.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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