Archive:New Chapter Email

Hey! I'm Parker Phinney from the Students for Free Culture board.

NEWSFLASH!! We're having our annual Students for Free Culture gathering April 22nd in Berkeley, CA, in conjunction with the Innovate/Activate conference. We have some travel funding to help students get there. I hope that I'll see you there!

Thanks for reaching out about starting a new Students for Free Culture chapter! Here's some general info to get you started: (this is all available at http://wiki.freeculture.org/New_Chapter_Email)

After sending this email, I'll automatically subscribe you to our discussion mailing list, as well as our chapters mailing list. More on that below.

Tips for what to do with your chapter:
No two SFC chapters are the same. In the past, chapters have hosted "Open Art" exhibitions, brought in speakers, and put on movie nights with documentaries relating to the movement. This page on our wiki is a great place to start looking for ideas for chapter programming: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Year_one But you don't just have to think in terms of campus programming. Some chapters just meet weekly to chat about their shared interest in freedom, sharing and openness. Some write really cool software, like youtomb.mit.edu.

In the last couple years there's been an especially large movement among chapters to work as advocates for openness and sharing within their own universities (we call this our "Open University Campaign," and it's described here: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Open_University_Campaign). For example, here at Dartmouth, I just got funding to continue some work that I've been doing on advocating for and creating an OpenCourseWare system here.

Let's chat on the phone or skype!
We've got all your info down in our database, but we'd like to connect with you before listing your chapter on our website--just to make sure that you're a human ;) It'd be nice to just take 10-15 minutes to learn more about your interest and answer any questions you may have and hopefully provide a helpful connection or two.

My number is +1(310) 439-8885. Feel free to call any time, or we can schedule something specific if you'd rather.

Just to start you thinking, here're the things I plan to bring up: interesting to you?
 * how did you first get interest in free culture? what issues are most
 * what can we the board do to help you out?
 * what, if anything, has your chapter done so far?
 * what are your plans for the rest of the year?
 * do you have a strategy for continuity through to next year?

Andrea Fassina (SFC board, working on SFC Europe stuff) is also available at this skype address: StudentsforFreeCulture

A few more logistics, including stuff to pass on to your chapter members:
email webteam@freeculture.org with your request. helping out at all with maintaining and building our web resources, please please please email webteam@freeculture.org to let us know! We could use all the help we can get, and not all of it is super technical (for example, to create chapter blogs all you need to do is log in to a webpage and press buttons, and it would be /great/ to have a volunteer that agreed to take charge on that) list. This is really the place to be--it's where you'll hear about cool projects, upcoming events (like the recent Open Access Week), and increasingly it's a place where inter-chapter communication happens. Hopefully your chapter can help to facilitate more of that! And feel free to use it to ask questions! Subscribe as many other members of your chapter as you'd like here: http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss (if you have trouble, follow these simple instructions: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss)
 * If you're interested in getting a chapter blog and/or mailing list,
 * If you or any of the members of your chapter are interested in
 * As I said, I subscribed you to the discuss@freeculture.org mailing