Archive:Next year

This will be our big campaign for the fall. Basically, our energies this summer will be directed towards:


 * fixing up this website
 * creating a strong online community using:
 * IRC (IRC with Gaim)
 * mailing lists, such as our discussion mailing list
 * comments on our blog
 * this wiki
 * preparing people to launch clubs at their individual schools.

Summer campaigns so far:
 * http://savetheipod.com and http://savethe.org - oppose the Induce Act. Perhaps we should integrate this with campaigns in the fall.
 * http://barbieinablender.org - We need to be able to critique the society around us in our art.

Then in the fall, we will launch groups at as many schools as possible. We'd like to see as many committments to start a new group as possible... the more schools that are operational, the more collective experience we'll have, and the easier it will be to start more groups on other campuses. Also, the more committments the better we sound when we talk to reporters ;-)

We will kick off the school year for all the new groups with the Right to Share Campaign (this name is open for debate). This campaign comes in three parts:


 * 1) We get students to produce as much Creative Commons licensed work (or any kind of copylefted work) as possible on their college campuses.  This can be accomplished by
 * 2) *convincing existing publications/bands/professors etc. to begin using a Creative Commmons license
 * 3) * starting new projects specifically for the purpose of creating copylefted work and encouraging community participation
 * 4) We push for network freedom, campaigning for campuses to open up ports, allow students to run servers, etc., and fight against implementation of anything the RIAA suggests, (or any of the evil DRM'd music services like Roxio's Napster?)
 * 5) We then share what we've produced with one another, and encourage creative uses of our works, remixing, mashups, translations, sequels... a true participatory free culture!

The CC-licensing really should be a no-brainer, most students want as many people to read/see/hear their stuff as possible... and it's not just about sharing, it's about the remixing / collaborating with people you've never met etc.

The point is to make people understand that it's not just about "piracy", even though filesharing of copyrighted material isn't nearly so bad as the RIAA makes it out to be, if it's bad at all. Think about VCRs and the Betamax case, etc. The point is to re-frame the debate, to produce a significant amount of legal uses for filesharing networks to encourage Betamax-style court rulings, and to increase awareness of Creative Commons / copyleft.

Groups at each school can emphasize different parts of the agenda, but the reason we've chosen this campaign is that CC-licensing stuff is something that ANYONE can do, and you can see concrete results. We can protest the Patriot Act all we want, but it's not obvious that anything will happen. I think that it's most important at this stage to get as many people onboard as possible, so that we can use that base of support to take on larger law-changing campaigns. This is a bottom-up strategy to make visible changes in the local community,  I think it's important for people to feel like they're contributing (and that they actually are contributing, not doing makework). The Patriot Act and all of the other oodles of free culture issues are of course still on the agenda, but we need a tightly-focused campaign which is media-friendly and which anyone can be involved in no matter how un-geeky or apolitical.

We want a media-friendly international campaign that will make headlines, it's got to look big. Lots of local press adds up: someone starting a club and getting local press at each school across the country can result in a NYTimes article etc. if we pitch it right. We've still got lots of contacts from the Diebold case, and with the help of Downhill Battle we should be able to break into the mainstream media if we work hard this summer.

When this page starts sounding intelligent enough, start writing a press release based on it at right to share, or whatever we decide the title of the campaign ought to be.... perhaps "Create, share, collaborate"? Something else?