Hey gang, With the new board election out of the way, it's time to start looking at the next year of SFC. I think we can make it a really good one.
I want to start off by reminding people that the Board's role is simply to be the last layer of decision making for the organization. See: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Bylaws#Section_1.3._Board_Duties_and_Powers Historically, the board has ended up doing a great deal of the day-to-day work of the organization, mostly due to its own failure to communicate. This is something I'm really hoping to fix. All that is to say: If you have some cool ideas for projects, initiatives, website updates, etc--speak up! And don't ask for permission--ask for help. If you think something is a good idea, then it probably is. This can be something large-scale like the Europe conference, or it can be as small-scale as a blog post. If you were interested in serving on the board but didn't quite make it this year, keep in mind that there are plenty of leadership roles that you can still take on (run a campaign! lead part of the conference organization! act as the point of contact for new chapters! re-write our website content!) In general, I think we can have a very strong year if we focus on building things that people are excited about building and using. These can be explanatory campaign websites (like the now-gone Barbie in a Blender Day http://freeculture.org/blog/2004/07/12/barbie-in-a-blender-a-celebration-of-free-speech-and-fair-use/) or development projects (like Noteshub.org). I'm excited about taking the next steps with officeofsharing.org, and I hope that some SFC folks will get excited about helping out. Be thinking about cool ways the SFC can actually make a difference by building something. Maybe you have an existing personal project that can become an SFC campaign and other people can jump in and help. Advocacy campaigns and letters/blog posts/etc can be powerful tools, but I encourage us to also work on branching out and thinking of real solutions that we can implement ourselves. For example, I spent a couple years trying to solve the "problem" of no OpenCourseWare at Dartmouth by writing letters to the editor and blog posts. Now I'm starting officeofsharing.org, which is just a label for "Parker works with profs at Dartmouth who want to create Open Educational Resources, providing tech, time, and some background knowledge. (And he wants to hand this job off to someone else at Dartmouth before he graduates.) (And he wants to help you do these things at your school too.) (He needs to get better about explaining this project.)" Anyway, the distinction here is development over advocacy. People should still do advocacy that they're excited about, but ultimately I think that we can build up more momentum, have more fun, and leave a greater impact through development. TL;DR: Let's build things. Help me to come up with cool projects, and to jump-start our existing ones. The power is yours. This year is going to rule. If you want to help out with the day-to-day of the organization, including running campaigns/projects/etc, join the "Core Team": http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/core -- http://www.madebyparker.com _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
