Hi folks, I'd like to get a dialog going about reviving both freeculture.org itself and potentially the idea of a Free Culture Foundation.
This list was originally set up for the Students for Free Culture organization, which was later announced to be transformed into a foundation [1]. Unfortunately, since that announcement more than three years ago, not much has happened (as far as I can tell). Indeed this listserv was unusable for a few months due to a diskspace issue on the server it runs on (this is now fixed; thanks to Asheesh & Kyra for looking into this). (If you don't remember subscribing to [email protected] , you can unsubscribe at the bottom of: http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ) I suspect I'm not alone on this list in believing that the concept of "Free Culture", especially when qualified in terms such as the Definition of Free Cultural Works, is one of the most important animating ideas for the 21st century's information society. So I would love to see freeculture.org become an organizing space that helps us solve pressing problems of the free culture movement. As the blog post in [1] noted, there are a lot of organizations in this space already, and I personally don't believe that yet another 501(c)(3) is a critical need right now. But I would like us to use this list, and a wiki, to put some thought into what the most urgent priorities for the free culture movement are, right now, and how we can work together to address them. The FSF has a "list of high priority projects" [2]. I'm not aware of a similar list in the larger free culture space, and if there's no such effort already, I'd love to begin taking a crack at it. My take is that this would be more focused on creating free/open platforms for the creation of free cultural works (alternatives to the likes of Soundcloud, Yelp, and other walled gardens). But I'm curious what others think. I'm also working on a couple of projects right now that I'd be happy to have identified under the freeculture.org umbrella for the time being: - freeyourstuff.cc, which is a browser extension for downloading one's own content contributions from closed platforms and releasing it under a DFCW-compliant license; - lib.reviews, which will be a free/open platform for reviews. We could revive the idea of teams on the wiki, and use the list to announce new initiatives that are consistent with some criteria that we set out. The closest parallel I'm aware of is the Open Knowledge Foundation, but this would be more focused on cultural works like photos, music, writing, etc. Ultimately, I do think a FCF 501(c)(3) may prove valuable, to incubate/fundraise/campaign, but to begin with, I would suggest we just use the list and the wiki for this purpose. I'd propose moving the wiki to the main freeculture.org domain, cleaning it up a little bit, and going from there. After some prodding, Asheesh kindly gave me access to the server, so I'm happy to get that overall process going, though some support/encouragement would be appreciated. ;-) I will be at Wikimania in Italy for a couple of days in case anyone on this list will be there and would like to connect in person. Warmly, Erik [1] http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/04/22/after-9-years-of-free-culture-advocacy-students-for-free-culture-is-now-the-free-culture-foundation/ [2] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
