Jose Murillo produced the following primer on Quora, explaining the legacy of Gilberto Gil (and his successors) and Lula’s policies, now endangered under a new Minister of Culture:

“I think it would be useful to mention the elements which, in my view, created the set and setting for the Brazilian Digital Culture Experiment.

* a minister of culture like Gilberto Gil, who created such thing as the Tropicalia movement in the 60s, and was seconded by his own vice, Juca Ferreira, resulting in 8 years (2002-2010) of a continued program happening at a strategic moment for technology and culture.

* advanced free software policies implemented since 2002 by the Brazilian government as a whole, creating a better IT environment for understanding the fabrics of the internet.

* a public program (Pontos de Cultura / Cultural Hotspots) to empower groups of artists to use digital technologies and free software to digitize their creativity, using alternative licenses (Creative Commons, Copyleft) to publish their content online, which resulted in the emergence of new and innovative cultural networks.

* a specific ‘locus’ in a public institution — the ministry’s digital culture department — ready to absorb and reprocess the feedback from those experiments of radical openness on public policies, through the intensive use of interactive interfaces and collaborative platforms that promote open conversations.

(1) I think it is important to highlight that there was a cultural narrative underlying the whole movement, one that Gil was able to adapt to the 21st century. For now I will go with a quote on the Tropicalist perspective from “Gilberto Gil: the open minister”

“The tropicalist visionary perspective is a legacy of the late 1960s when Gilberto Gil and his group were discovering a new global audience and experimenting with all kinds of cultural fusions. This perspective and the work that gave it life was inspired by a liberating, mind-opening and pioneering recognition: that the cosmopolitan electric-guitar beats from abroad and the rhythms of regional groups in the hinterlands of the Brazilian northeast were resonating to the same pulses of modernity. The urge to communicate and mix across cultures was the key to what came to be known as tropicalism. In the 2000s, Gil’s focus on the hacker ethics of openness for the digital culture was instrumental in highlighting a comparable mixing of cultures, peers, rhythms, codes and complexities. In his own way, he managed – four decades on, and in a transformed cultural, musical, media, political and technological environment – to creatively introduce new conceptual layers and nuances to his public discourse. The result was that he opened new ground for political debate over a range of contemporary issues: among them mass culture, the market, technology, traditional-modern tensions, and intellectual-property regulation.”

(2) The favorable scene for the use of free software in the federal government played a crucial role in the development of the Brazilian Digital Culture. The support from the public IT companies and local departments helped managing the many known obstacles that the implementation of free-software projects usually presents.

The ‘Software Publico’ program, developed by the Ministry of Planning, fostered the formation of communities of users of many different open source applications and programs, generating the right mood for adoption and investment inside public institutions.

We’ve been living this pro-free software atmosphere in the Brazilian government since 2002, so it is easy to take for granted the advantages it presents for public policies. On a recent trip to a neighbor country in South America, where the government does not have any free software policy, it was shocking to witness how difficult it is to establish and support new public initiatives based on digital technology.

Although the Brazilian Government has made extensive implementation of open applications through the establishment of administrative regulations, there was not much direct investment on open and distributed development communities or projects. We could say that this was the missing piece for the Brazilian gov free software strategy.

As a plus, free software absorption by public institutions in Brazil is also stimulating a new approach for the management of shared resources — maybe we could say it was a first experience with digital commons governance strategies inside the government.

The ‘Brazilian Public Software’, more about it here:

• Brazilian Public Software: beyond Sharing
• The Network Dynamics of the Brazilian Public Software (http://www.iiis.org/CDs2009/CD20…)
• The Evaluation of the Brazilian Public Software Portal