Archive:Local projects

Here are some suggestions of projects your chapter can pick up at any time to educate, to help the movement, or to strengthen your chapter.

Parties
I was serious when I said that we need to do more parties. All of our local groups should throw a party of some kind this semester, there's no point to activism if we don't have any fun. Free Culture Swarthmore is planning a LAN party... get creative!

Campus radio stations
Guest host a Free Culture radio show of CC-licensed music

Free Culture Campuses
Make your school free!
 * Free software on campus computers
 * Both official college computers e.g. in library or computer lab and on personal computers of students & faculty
 * Firefox can be huge
 * Create list of OSS replacements for programs students & educators commonly use
 * Targeted at Windows/Mac users -- if you use *nix, BSD, etc., you're probably already well-versed in free software
 * Office suite
 * OpenOffice (Win, Mac)
 * AbiWord (Win, Mac)
 * Web browser
 * Firefox (Win, Mac)
 * E-mail
 * Thunderbird (Win, Mac)
 * Text editor
 * Graphics editor
 * GIMP (Win, Mac)
 * IM/chat
 * Gaim (Win)
 * Adium (Mac)
 * A/V playback (MP3, video files, etc.)
 * CD ripping/burning
 * CDex (Win) ripping
 * School documents in open (non-proprietary) file formats
 * Registrar forms, class readings/handouts, course catalogs, lecture videos, etc.
 * .pdf and .doc are two of the biggest offenders... what else?
 * No Flash or other proprietary formats on college Web sites
 * No anti-p2p, port blocking, etc. software on campus network
 * Responsible patent practices
 * Divestment from companies that abuse IP law
 * If you maliciously sue over phony/weak allegations of copyright/patent/trademark infringement, you won't be doing business at this school!
 * CC licensing for college publications, research, media, etc.; open source licenses for college-created software
 * Digitizing public domain library collections

Digitize public domain literature

 * Collaborate with your campus library: What are our most valuable collections? What collections make us unique? Digitize them (if not already online) and post to Project Gutenberg.
 * Work with other campus organizations. Work with the Hispanic Student Association to digitize a travelogue of Mexico, the Black Student Union to scan a slave's autobiography, etc. Be creative! Find students at your college who would like to donate their time to work on something that interests them.
 * Does your school house unique collections of public domain photographs, artwork, sheet music...? Find a Web site that specializes in that and digitize for them.
 * If you can't/don't want to digitize, volunteer as a proofreader at Distributed Proofreaders. (Join the group "Free Culture".)
 * This can be an excellent way to make a good name for FC and improve the reputations of our schools.

Be the Media

 * shortwave (HAM) radio
 * Amanda's blog entry 6 Jan 2005
 * low-power FM radio
 * An FM Broadcast Transmitter For Your Home Slashdot, 7 Jan 2005
 * publishing content under CC licenses
 * The Creative Commons Publisher makes it stupidly easy to host your own Creative Commons content on The Internet Archive.
 * Torrentocracy is testing out an easy-to-use content delivery system for individuals called Prodigem that allows people to publish their stuff via BitTorrent.
 * free CC image galleries
 * blogging / citizen journalism
 * RSS feeds
 * trackback
 * South Korean news source that's entirely citizen-written: Oh My News
 * guest host a radio show
 * public access TV